By CHRISTOPHER MANION
When I started working on Capitol Hill in 1981, Sen. Joe Biden had been there for eight years. A Senate old-timer warned me, “He’ll be here forever,” and he was right: In a poll that year, two-thirds of the people in his home state of Delaware said they knew Joe Biden personally. He went on to serve as senator and presiding officer of the Senate for 36 more years.
Biden was a Senate powerhouse. He chaired the Judiciary Committee and led the campaign to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987. His fellow pro-abortion Catholic Ralph Neas (Notre Dame Class of 1968) played an indispensable role in that fiasco.
When Barak Obama arrived in the Senate in January 2005, Joe Biden, who by then had been there 32 years, took him under his wing. It was only natural that Joe would be Obama’s running mate in 2008. Everybody loved Joe.
Not anymore.
Today, the Prime Mandate for Democrats running to replace Donald Trump is to beat Joe Biden. With two dozen Democrats desperate to dethrone him, Joe the Unbeatable is an endangered species for the first time in his political life. That’s right. An old, heterosexual white guy with a voting record a mile long is about to be keelhauled by a gaggle of radicals who, just three years ago, would have swooned to be invited to sit next to him at a White House dinner.
In coming months, the herd of pandering Democrat aspirants will wander around the campaign barnyard. Most of them will be hard to tell apart — but not Joe. He will be a constant while pretenders rise and fall. In a few months, as the herd thins out and folks start paying attention, things will sort out. But Joe is likely still to be around when most of them have headed back home.
The Baggage That
Won’t Go Away
Joe’s a regular guy. He had to put up with Obama’s pomposity, but doesn’t flaunt it himself. So when he has to confront the flak, he’ll be glib, even brazen. Nonetheless, the flak is serious.
Joe’s under fire already, from both Democrats and Republicans, over allegations that his son Hunter might have used his father’s official ties with the Chinese Communist government to benefit financially. As intrepid researcher Peter Schweitzer describes it, “In 2013, then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden flew aboard Air Force Two to China. Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden’s firm inked a $1 billion private equity deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China. The deal was later expanded to $1.5 billion. In short, the Chinese government funded a business that it co-owned along with the son of a sitting vice president.”
Politics for plunder is unseemly, but the record of “Rollin’ Eyes Joe” presents even greater problems for both pro-lifers and pro-aborts. Once nominally pro-life, Joe recently made everyone mad by waffling on his support of the longstanding Hyde Amendment, which forbids taxpayer dollars from being used to finance abortions. But his problems with abortion go deeper.
Biden is known for his “politician’s smile” — cold eyes and lots of teeth. He’s also got what folks used to call “the gift of the gab.” Trouble is, he talks so much that he often tells the truth by mistake.
On a trip to China in August 2011, Biden addressed Communist China’s brutal forced-abortion policy. He told a university audience that “your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.”
Biden’s defenders defended the comment by insisting that Biden was “just being diplomatic.” Why, he wasn’t even familiar with the program’s details! China expert Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, disagreed. Mosher, the scholar responsible for pulling the curtain back on China’s brutal population policy, made clear that Biden had known the gruesome details of the program for years.
“While serving as a commissioner of the U.S. Commission on Broadcasting to China, I briefed then-Senator Biden on population control, Chinese style,” he wrote shortly after Biden’s China trip. “I know that Joe Biden ‘fully understands’ how women are arrested for the ‘crime’ of being pregnant, how they are incarcerated and browbeaten for this ‘crime,’ and how they are forced to undergo abortions and sterilizations. I know because I told him so.”
“The vice president was clearly pandering to his Chinese hosts,” Mosher continued. “This wasn’t ignorance and it wasn’t a gaffe. Biden wanted China’s Communist leaders to know that he and the president he serves are more than willing to turn a blind eye to the atrocities committed in the name of the one-child policy. In other words, Joe Biden has perfected the kowtow.”
Mosher went on the describe how the Obama-Biden administration had poured money into the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), both of which work hand in glove with Beijing’s population control apparatus.
Free and universal abortion on demand is one of the most prevailing goals among the most hard-core voters in Democrat primaries. It’s part of the unanimous attack on natural law. Sometimes it’s so ludicrous it’s almost funny: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thought she was appealing to veterans when she gave advice to House Members running for reelection in tough districts: “Brave Transgender Servicemembers Continue to Face Trump Administration’s Cruel Campaign,” she announced on June 26, the fourth anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges.
“Since that momentous day, we have been blessed by the countless LGBTQ couples and families whose love and devotion have enriched our communities and honored our nation’s highest ideals.”
Moving On And Staying Put
Our bishops are desperate to “move on” from the scandals, so they have ruled out any participation by troublesome laymen in future investigations (if there are any investigations at all).
Some laymen are saying “no way!” One of the most troublesome is George Neumayr, an investigative reporter who broke the story of the corruption in the Washington, D.C., Archdiocese years ago. His stories focused on Donald Cardinal Wuerl, but included the rector of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Msgr. Walter Rossi. Rossi, Neumayr recalls, was a protégé of two key players: his predecessor, Bishop Michael Bransfield, and Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, both now disgraced and removed from office.
Archbishop Carlo Viganò once identified Rossi as part of a “gay mafia,” adding the startling revelation that Rossi had been accused of molesting students at the Catholic University of America (where he sits on the board). Both Cardinal Wuerl and the Vatican’s Cardinal Parolin had known about these allegations, Viganò insists.
Rossi has a curious history. Eleven years ago, he banned The Faithful Departed, a book by Catholic author Phil Lawler, from the Shrine’s popular bookstore. Why? He wouldn’t return our calls, but he complained to The Washington Times that Pope Benedict “over and over again said it’s time to move on. It’s not over, oh my God, no, but he says there should be healing and to move on.”
Well, it’s not over, that’s for sure. And on Corpus Christi Sunday, it was George Neumayr’s turn to “Move On.” DC police and the basilica security force, on direct orders from Msgr. Rossi, ordered Neumayr to leave when he tried to attend Mass at the Shrine.
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