In the midst of Sh*tholegate, we offer a little comic relief. The man perhaps best known for having once whispered the sentence “This is a big f*cking deal” in the ear of the president weighed in yesterday on Donald Trump’s alleged use of the slur sh*thole to describe third world countries.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, aka the Emily Post of presidential protocol, upbraided his boss’s successor on Twitter on Friday, admonishing:
It’s not how a president should speak. It’s not how a president should behave. Most of all, it’s not what a president should believe. We’re better than this.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 12, 2018
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Biden is one to lecture on presidential speech and cultural insensitivity. In 2006, as a senator with designs on running for the presidency, he said:
In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.
A year later, after entering the race for the Democratic nomination, he said of fellow candidate Barack Obama:
I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.
Two years later, he uttered this gem about the sh*thole country to the south:
I would tell members of my family, and I have, I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places right now. It’s not that it’s going to Mexico, it’s that you are in a confined aircraft. When one person sneezes, it goes everywhere through the aircraft. That’s me.
But Biden’s advice to President Trump was not limited to speaking presidentially but to behaving like a president. Which evidently would be the diametric opposite of how Biden behaved as vice president. A former Secret Service agent assigned to him claims that his full-time job was to protect women from Biden, describing the veep’s actions toward the fairer sex as “Weinstein level stuff.”
Said the agent:
We had to cancel the VP Christmas get together at the Vice President’s house because Biden would grope all of our wives and girlfriend’s asses. He would mess with every single woman or teen. It was horrible.
Some of his creepier antics were captured in stills and videos:
