Keep Talking, Joe

“I wonder if the lion be to speak—No wonder, my Lord; one lion may, when many asses do.”

—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Some of you are going to gag when you read this, but I have to be honest:

I love it when Joe Biden talks.  Seriously. 

Unlike Maureen Dowd or Paul Krugmann, neither of whom can I even bring myself to read anymore, I can’t get enough of the Vice President, and as far as I’m concerned, we should pay to have him miked and recorded 24/7.  Every time he opens his mouth, pure gold spews forth, and you know that down at Obama Manor the Monarch-In-Chief is throwing a 7-iron at a Secret Service agent:  Can’t someone put a #@*%$#% teleprompter in front of that @%&#%$* ?!?

It seems Genius Joe was in China this week to . . . wait, does anyone know why, exactly, the Vice President was in China, other than with everyone else having skipped town it seemed dangerous to leave him in the District by himself?  Like so much else with this rudderless administration, there doesn’t seem to have been a particular agenda or purpose for sending Biden to China.  But there he was, giving a speech in which he at least gave the appearance of expressing no criticism of China’s one-child-per-family policy:

You have no safety net.  Your policy has been one which I fully understand—I’m not second-guessing—of one child per family.  The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people.  Not sustainable.

In its backpedaling, the Vice President’s office points out that Biden’s remark was made in the context of explaining that the policy is economically unsustainable in relation to China’s entitlement programs.  Which is interesting, given that he told U.S troops in Japan yesterday that “I didn’t come [to Asia] to explain a damn thing.”  Well, whatever Biden was doing, what he didn’t do was say, as his office has later claimed is his position, that he finds China’s one-child policy “repugnant.”  He said he “fully understand[s]” it, and he’s “not second-guessing” it.  Not a lot of gray there.

Even if we accept that he wasn’t affirmatively endorsing China’s one-child policy, to say that Biden’s statements were colossally stupid and insensitive would be putting it mildly.

As an initial point, I don’t understand his math.  Two parents plus one child equals three people.  How does he get to one wage earner taking care of four retirees (for a total of five)?  Maybe he’s assuming that the parents later divorce and enter into same-sex relationships all under the single child’s household.  Or something like that.

More substantively, Biden is, of course, ignoring the well-documented human rights travesty the Chinese policy has been:

·     Quotas for abortions and sterilizations imposed on counties failing to enforce the policy;

·     Forced late term abortions against the mother’s will;

·     Post-birth infanticide;

·     Preferential abortions/infanticide to favor survival of male children over female;

·     Razing of homes and imposition of exorbitant fines as enforcement measures;

·     Governmental “erasure” of children born in violation of the policy.

So let me get this straight, Joe.  We’re going to stop the oil industry from producing domestic oil and creating jobs in the U.S. in order to save the Lesser Prairie Chicken and Sand Dune Lizard, but you’re not going to second guess a regime that has an official policy of forced abortion, sterilization, and outright killing of innocent children.  And the Chinese policy is particularly atrocious as to little girls.  Were such a policy in place in the U.S. at the time they were born, women like Margaret Sanger wouldn’t be here. 

Where is NOW when you need them? 

When Joe Biden speaks in his official capacity as Vice President on official White House business, he is legally acting as an agent of the Obama administration, and as such his words are directly attributable to Obama as though Obama said them himself.  This wasn’t some trivial gaffe like misspeaking about the number of states in the Union or confusing Elvis’ birthday with the anniversary of his death.  Biden didn’t just get his facts mixed up because of jet lag.  He could simply have said that the current Chinese policy results in too few children to support too many retirees and as such is unsustainable.  It wasn’t necessary for him to preface his comments on the economic consequences of the one-child policy with a caveat that he doesn’t second-guess the substance of the policy itself.  But he did.  And in doing it he exposed himself and this administration. 

Biden said children are an entitlement program safety net, not human beings.  By saying that out loud he conceded what many of us have understood all along that what people like him on the Left are about is shameless self-gratification now, with the consequences to be borne by someone else later.  Rather than you being responsible and saving for your own retirement, or at least the government saving the money it takes from you for that purpose and returning it to you in your retirement—remember, that’s what Social Security was supposed to have been—Biden’s idea is that government should spend the money it takes from you on other things now, and then count on each generation producing more children to pay into the system than the number of that generation who will live long enough to draw from the system later (that’s the illegal con game called a Ponzi scheme, for you uninitiated).  A government policy like China’s limiting the numbers in each future generation, isn’t a problem because of the human cost of killing innocent children; Biden—and by extension Obama—is “not second-guessing” that.  It’s a problem because it jeopardizes the entitlement system.

This is why the system is broken.  It was designed from its inception as the mother of all frauds, to be borne on the back of a child. 

Talk, Joe.  Talk.