Fire Joe Biden

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/11/12

Possibly because of the Obama/Hollywood fete this week with Obama yucking it up with George Clooney and the Beautiful People I keep getting this annoying image of Joe Biden in Apocalypse Now! with Obama as the Brando baldy Mr. Kurtz, the god king gone mad from self idolatry and ethereal abstraction, and Biden as his coked-up scurrying sidekick played by Dennis Hopper: “He (Obama/Brando/Kurtz) is not like you and I,” says Hopper/Biden, wild eyed and arms flailing. “He reads poetry. Out loud!” T. S. Eliot no doubt. I cannot imagine how Obama, five points behind Mitt Romney in the current Rasmussen poll, thinks this is going to work for him. Does he really want to be President a second term or is President just resume filler and like Kurtz (and Clinton), he has greater plans ahead as a demigod?

I don’t think he can count on the adoring Millennials to carry him this time. They seem to have passed already, overshadowed by the rising Hunger Games crowd. But it is not only narcissism on a cosmic scale that afflicts this president. It is incompetence. And nothing represents this incompetence as characteristic of the Obama administration like the presence of Joe Biden on the ticket.

Obama is, as Bill Clinton is reported to have said in a new book (“The Amateur” by Edward Klein), such “an amateur” that Clinton pressed his wife to challenge him in the primaries. But Joe Biden is an incompetent. Bloomberg reports that he apologized to President Barack Obama for upsetting the White House’s timetable for revealing the president’s support for same-sex marriage, according to an administration official. But this behavior, starting early on in Israel, has been characteristic of Biden.

President Obama seems today a vacuous fiction of Hollywood and the geist. But he has here the rare opportunity to shift gears on the incompetence front. He could take this opportunity to fire Joe Biden and replace him with someone serious, someone honorable, someone mature and competent and someone who could gather a few votes outside of city limits of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.. Both senators from Virginia come to mind, Jim Webb or Mark Warner. He might even prepare a future for the Democrats and trump the Republicans by going country with Montana governor Brian Schweitzer or Montana Senator Joe Tester.