The Malignant Joe Biden

Why everyone—especially Democrats—should be outraged at the latest Joe Biden news. The "original sin" is not the 2024 campaign; it is Biden himself.

We are told that decency and compassion compels everyone to “change the tone” about Joe Biden in the wake of his shocking and grim cancer diagnosis. Sorry, not going to oblige. And I don’t care if readers think I am mean-spirited or vindictive. There is a cosmic irony that the Biden story looks to end at last with a diagnosis of advanced malignancy, given that Biden has been one of the most malignant forces in our politics for his entire life.

Let’s start with his single most insidious act of degrading American politics: the infamous Bork nomination in 1987. Shortly before becoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, Biden told a reporter:

“Say the [Reagan] administration sends up Bork, and, after our investigation, he looks a lot like another Scalia. I’d have to vote for him, and if the groups tear me apart, that’s the medicine I’ll have to take. I’m not Ted Kennedy.”

But when Bork arrived, Biden was instantly rolled by Ted Kennedy and “the groups,” just as “the groups” ran the policy formation of his presidency. He protracted the confirmation process to legitimize personal attacks and demagoguery (with attempted sequels for Clarence Thomas and others), and thereby distorting and degrading our judicial confirmation process ever since, with deleterious effects.¹

What a man of principle! Such steadfastness! Even the Washington Post looked askance at Biden’s extraordinary distortions of Bork’s confirmation, noting in an editorial that it would be hard for Bork to get a fair hearing when Biden “has already cast himself in the role of a prosecutor instead of a juror.” And when it was over, the Post’s judgment was that “the campaign against [Bork] did not resemble an argument so much as a lynching,” adding that the attacks were marked by “intellectual vulgarity and personal savagery.” All courtesy of Joe Biden.

In yet another irony, Biden was right when he said, “I’m not Ted Kennedy.” At least Kennedy stood for something during his long career. National health care was his primary cause, but he also was a stalwart for labor unions, and besides, no one ever doubted Kennedy’s inherent liberalism. Can anyone name a great policy cause associated with Joe Biden, ever? What was his ideological center? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Biden was always a chameleon, with the sole object of advancing Joe Biden and his grifting family. In the 1970s he was something of a conservative Democrat, criticizing civil rights enforcement, opposing busing, voting for every tax cut proposal of the time, including all of Reagan’s tax cuts, but also cutting the capital gains tax in half in 1978. (In fact the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer’s Association—the people who brought us Proposition 13 in California and helped ignite the tax revolt—actually endorsed Biden for re-election in 1978.) He voted against some of the leading progressive proposals of the 1970s, such as the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment bill.

Biden never progressed beyond the dishonesty, plagiarism, and superficiality that forced him early from the 1988 presidential race. He lies about everything, often in disgusting ways, such as blaming a “drunk driver” for the car accident death of his first wife, even though the truck driver was not drunk and the police report placed the blame for the accident on Biden’s wife. (It took the threat of a libel suit from the truck driver to get Biden to stop lying about it.)

Biden could be considered a tragic figure if he had actually stood for something other than his own advancement. The news of his cancer comes out at the moment the entire Democratic Party is poised to turn on him even more than they did to poor Jimmy Carter for losing in a landslide to Ronald Reagan. Biden enabled Trump to return to office. While the cancer diagnosis puts off the reckoning, it cannot prevent it. He’s going to go down in Democratic folklore as the worst president their party ever produced.

And consider what might have been. If Biden had resigned in 2023, citing his age and the fact that he had accomplished his main legislative agenda, he’d have gone down in history as a noble example of selflessness. He was never going to do this, even if there wasn’t the widespread and well-founded perception that Kamala Harris wasn’t up to the job of President and couldn’t win in 2024. But whose fault was that? And why? Once again, Biden saddled himself and his party with Harris because he couldn’t say no to progressive pressure and pick someone capable of being Vice President or President.

He could still have decided in 2023 not to run again, and allowed the Democrats to have a full primary contest that would likely have landed on someone other than Harris, given how bad she is at campaigning. And it might still have happened in July of last year, except that Biden decided to follow his vicious, vindictive streak by anointing Harris and foreclosing any nomination contest.

Which finally brings us to the full repulsiveness of “Doctor” Jill Biden. She’s managed the seemingly impossible: she’s taken the crown away from Hillary Clinton as the most grasping First Lady in American history. It was commonplace starting as early as 2021 that Biden’s retinue, starting especially with his spouse, was “elder abuse.” This appears literally true if we discover that Biden’s cancer was known several years ago, as nearly everyone thinks—unless he was receiving negligent medical checkups. Which makes the scandal even worse. It was never widely reported that in 1984 Nancy Reagan wanted her husband not to run for re-election, not because of any health concerns, but because she wanted to enjoy their remaining life together under more normal circumstances. Now compare with Jill Biden. And give Edith Wilson an upgrade.

If Biden eventually undergoes cancer surgery of some kind, I look forward to being able to paraphrase Evelyn Waugh’s famous quip about Randolph Churchill, who Waugh strongly disliked, upon hearing the news that Randolph had a benign tumor surgically removed: “Typical of modern science to find the one tiny bit of Randolph Churchill that is not malignant, and remove it.”

Goes double for Joe Biden. Only in this case they won’t be removing enough.

1. Prior to the Bork nomination, the average interval between a Supreme Court nomination and the start of confirmation hearings in the 20^thcentury had been 13 days, with the longest ever being 41 days. Among other effects, the 71-day delay in the beginning of the Bork confirmation hearings meant the Supreme Court had to begin its fall term in 1987 with only eight Justices.