By Vincent Carroll - Denver Post Columnist
Dan Quayle may have set the modern record for embarrassing gaffes by a vice president but most were simply goofy mistakes. Quayle would get lost in an off-the-cuff statement misspell a word or misplace a century.
Joe Biden on the other hand is a different sort of court jester -- one with a jagged edge. When the vice president and one-time plagiarist and resume padder isnt assuring the Chinese government that I fully understand its immoral and now disastrous one-child policy hes accusing political opponents of indifference to murder and rape.
In his latest series of bizarre pronouncements the vice president accused critics of the presidents $447 billion jobs bill of being soft on violent crime because some of the money would be used to hire cops and firefighters.
In Bidens view moreover opponents who point out that the federal funds would be temporary need a good scare to straighten them out.
Well let me tell you he said last week in Philadelphia its not temporary when that 911 call comes in and a womans being raped if a cop shows up in time to prevent the rape. ... Its not temporary to the guy whose store is being held up and a gun is being pointed to his head; if a cop shows up and hes not killed thats not temporary to that store owner.
Give me a break temporary! I wish these guys that thought its temporary I wish they had some notion what its like to be on the other side of a gun. Or a 200-pound man standing over you telling you to submit.
Biden is one heartbeat away from the presidency and he thinks he can talk like a goon and tar deficit hawks as heartless.
Shouldnt a city the size of Philadelphia be able to support its own police at a time of trillion-dollar federal deficits -- and especially when crime is on a rapid retreat?
Violent crime nationally has been on more or less a regular decline since the early 1990s with the FBI estimating the 2010 violent crime rate for example at 13.2 percent below the 2006 level and 13.4 percent below the 2001 level.
In Colorado homicides last year dropped to their lowest annual total since 1969.
Even property crimes such as burglary have declined in recent years despite a recession and high unemployment factors that experts thought might put a brake on the good news.
So remarkable is the overall trend that The New York Times reports that experts are baffled.
There was no immediate consensus to explain the drop The Times wrote in May. But some experts said the figures collided with theories about correlations between crime unemployment and the number of people in prison.
There are exceptions to the upbeat crime news naturally and the vice president inevitably found one. He actually launched his lurid accusations regarding opposition to the jobs bill a few days earlier in Flint Mich. an urban basket case whose own newspaper The Flint Journal admits Crime is out of control here.
No kidding. When the city had 265 sworn officers in 2008 the same editorial explained it had 35 murders and 91 rapes. In 2010 it had 144 police officers and the city recorded a record 65 murders and 229 rapes. So the paper praised Biden for citing Flint when pushing the jobs bill and for worrying that God only knows what the numbers will be this year in Flint.
But just as hard cases make bad law they can lead to bad policy too. Any city in which state troopers have to be brought in to help patrol streets as in Flint is by definition a lonely outlier as opposed to a compelling example of why we need another stimulus bill.
Someone needs to tell our blowhard vice president that if we dont slow the growth of federal spending God only knows what the economy will look like in a few years.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at
vcarroll@denverpost.com.
