Do Biden's Gaffes Matter Anymore?
Our famously gaffe-prone vice president, Joe Biden, has outdone himself. He stumbled through not one, not two, but three gaffes in less than 24 hours. For him, that's a personal best, or, more accurately, a personal worst.
Yet, if it is better to be criticized than ignored in politics, he can take little comfort from the way that hardly anyone outside of the Republican National Committee, whose website called it "Gaffetastic," seemed to care.
Although Biden has not announced whether he might run for his boss's job in 2016, it seems more than coincidence that his latest dustups occurred on a speaking tour in Iowa, a big pond these days for presidential hopefuls testing the water for 2016.
In a Tuesday speech, he made unfortunate news by referring to unscrupulous lenders of bad loans to military service members as "Shylocks." That term, derived from a Jewish character in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," has long been viewed as an ethnic slur.
The next day in Des Moines, only hours after apologizing for the Shylock remark, he referred to Asia as "the Orient." Among others, Ninio Fetalvo, the Republican National Committee Asian American and Pacific Islander spokesman, denounced that usage as "offensive to both Asian-Americans and our Asian allies abroad" for its " disrespectful" and "unacceptable imperialist undertones."
Later that day, as reports of his two-in-one-day gaffe-fest streamed out, he made a third. Answering a reporter's question, he raised the possibility that the United States might commit ground troops, also called "boots on the ground," and not just airstrikes to fight the Islamic State in Iraq. "We'll determine that," he told a reporter, "based on how the effort goes."
With that, he rhetorically opened a door of military possibilities that the Obama administration has tried mightily to keep shut.
Yet major TV newscasts ignored these controversial eruptions, according to conservative media watchdogs. The conservative NewsBusters site quoted commentators on liberal-leaning MSNBC who seemed to excuse Biden's gaffes as sounding "real" and "authentic," raising charges of a double standard by the usual suspects in the allegedly liberal mainstream media.
"Why didn't the media dismiss (former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah) Palin's faux pas as just part of her 'being real'?" one viewer commented.
Media bias? Maybe. But the thought that the gaffe-prone Palin, charmer that she is, could have been a heartbeat from the presidency instead of Biden does not fill me with confidence, either.
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