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.
they wanted to ‘ redefine’ rape.
the VP was on point and shouldn’t apologize for shyt.
when did Cheney apologize?
Sort of – the most effective criticism viscerally resonates with the target audience. For the GOP base the bottom line truth is that Obama is not part of their tribe and he is not primarily concerned about them and theirs, so the Birther controversy, Death Panels, and charges of socialism resonate at that visceral level because they underscore a fundamental truth with their base – Obama is “other” and other is bad.
That doesn’t directly translate to the left’s base – there is some “other” thinking on the left too (q.v. PUMAs), but the closest thing to a unifying visceral theme on the left is a dearth of compassion by the right, and that is the theme upon which Biden played. It’s the reason that Dubya initially went with the Compassionate Conservative moniker, to negate the unifying theme of the left. We are still in 2011, so I would imagine that this is the beginning of an argument that will be ramped up over the next 18 months or so, but the GOP’s lack of compassion is the best line of argumentation to unite the left against the right’s assault.
I would frame it up something like this:
But that’s me – I miss Alan Grayson, but I think he’s be proud to use this.
use “screw” instead of the ‘f’ word and you’re in business.
Depends on the audience and the speaker – it has to resonate viscerally so it needs to be spoken at that level – but in many instances I agree that a PG version would indeed be the better way to go so that it resonates instead of offending.