I have always liked Joe Biden:
The vice president, known for speaking his mind and at times putting his foot in his mouth, said that Republicans who want to cut spending while at the same time cutting taxes for the wealthy are similar to rape apologists.
In setting up his comparison, the vice president explained to the audience that before the Violence Against Women Act that he championed was passed into law, “there was this attitude in our society of blaming the victim,” according to a press pool account of the event.
“When a woman got raped, blame her because she was wearing a skirt too short, she looked the wrong way or she wasn’t home in time to make the dinner,” Biden said.
“We’ve gotten by that,” he said. “But it’s amazing how these Republicans, the right wing of this party – whose philosophy threw us into this God-awful hole we’re in, gave us the tremendous deficit we’ve inherited – that they’re now using, now attempting to use, the very economic condition they have created to blame the victim – whether it’s organized labor or ordinary middle-class working men and women. It’s bizarre. It’s bizarre.”
I think the job of a vice-president is to make sharp attacks that would not be befitting of the president of United States. If you need someone to call the press a bunch of “nattering nabobs of negativity” the Veep is the person to do it. But it’s probably more important in this administration than any other I’ve seen. Obama has a role he plays and it isn’t consistent with truly calling the Republicans to account for their horrible record or their appalling hypocrisy. If anything, Biden didn’t go far enough because what he said was literally true. As the Republicans have demonstrated, a truly effective attack has zero relationship to the truth. This is counterintuitive, as it would seem like convincing criticism would be more effective if it were plausible. It turns out that the most effective criticism is just made up. So, we get the Birther controversy, or Death Panels, or charges of socialism. Those criticisms are very effective, convince a lot of people, but have no justifiable basis whatsoever.
Still, the Republicans actually thought of introducing a bill in the House that would ban abortion for statutory rape victims. So, Biden wasn’t exactly being unfair when he said that they are behaving like rape apologists. It was more true than he even let on.