‘You run the risk of deciding whether or not you’re going to prostitute yourself to give the answer you know they want to hear …’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Sen. Cory Booker, D-NJ, former presidential rival to current primary front-runner Joe Biden, became the latest to circle the wagons around Democrats’ deeply flawed presumptive anointee by attempting to distort fact.
During his recent endorsement, Booker said that Biden would “restore honor to the Oval Office and tackle our most pressing challenges.” While neither claim seems likely, one has an extensive track record actively debunking it.
Biden’s 50-year career in politics has proven, time and time again, that he is all too willing to “prostitute” himself, as he said during a 1974 PBS appearance.
“You run the risk of deciding whether or not you’re going to prostitute yourself to give the answer you know they want to hear in order to get funded to run for that office,” Biden said, according to the Free Beacon.
In the same program, the freshman senator, then in his early 30s, admitted that he benefited from tokenism due to his age.
“I’m like the token black or the token woman,” Biden said. “I was the token young person.”
Now a septuagenarian, his outlook on the superficiality of the Democratic political machine seems only to have grown stronger in the intervening decades.
Burisma and Beyond…
Conservative journalist Peter Schweizer has led the charge in building the case for Biden’s pattern of corrupt dealings, many of which serve the financial or personal interests of his close family members.
Notably, Schweier’s 2017 book Secret Empires brought back to the surface the buried scandal regarding son Hunter Biden‘s corrupt business dealings in Ukraine and China.
Those arrangements have since become widely known as part of the partisan Left’s impeachment effort against President Donald Trump, who sought during a July phone call to encourage the newly-elected Ukrainian president to re-open the dormant Burisma investigation that might potentially ensnare the Bidens.
After facing public scrutiny last year over his Ukraine and China deals, Hunter Biden eventually announced his resignation from both the boards, although the Chinese government as of December still considered him a board member in his state-backed investment venture there, BHR Partners.
Biden’s outrageous drug habits and tax evasion during his father’s term as vice president—as well as his paternity in an ongoing child-support lawsuit involving an ex-Washington, DC, stripper—raise serious questions about how his presidential-hopeful dad, who failed to rein in such a serious embarrassment within his own nuclear-family unit—might hope to control an unwieldy federal bureaucracy.
A Family Tradition
Other examples from the Biden family—many of them outlined in Schweizer’s most recent book, Profiles in Corruption—suggest that the family’s meal-ticket patriarch had little interest in steering his offspring and siblings down an ethical path—preferring, instead, to use his political sway to enable their legal and moral abuses.
Most shockingly, perhaps, is Joe Biden’s refusal to step in to encourage his well-heeled ne’er-do-well brother Frank to honor a wrongful death verdict against him.
The reckless abuse of power and privilege carries with it echoes of the late-Sen. Ted Kennedy‘s notorious Chappaquiddick incident.
Teenage sisters Lorraina and Nicole Albano were orphaned in 1999 after a Jaguar rented by Frank Biden—with him apparently riding shotgun in the passenger seat—hit and killed single parent Michael Albano on the Pacific Coast Highway in Cardiff, Calif.
Frank’s license had been suspended at the time in Florida—but not only was he able to rent the luxury sports coupe, he claimed to be letting a much younger companion, Jason Turton, test drive the car by going in excess of 70 mph on a dark, narrow stretch of road while trying to impress two females in the back.
The women said Frank Biden told Turton to “keep driving” after hitting Albano.
Although Frank was found liable for $880,000 in a civil judgment (which, with 20 years of interest, would be well over a million dollars), the ex-veep’s sibling has refused to pay, instead sheltering his significant financial assets in offshore investments and accounts.
When confronted about it, Joe Biden falsely claimed his brother lacked the financial means to pay, despite having used his political clout to advance his brother’s business interests in a Florida charter-school scam and the flimflam development of environmentally-conscious resorts in Costa Rica and Jamaica.
The List Goes On…
More recently, according to Politico, Biden’s other brother, James, was implicated in an investigation of Americore Health, with allegations that he made himself a half-million-dollar loan from the healthcare operation’s coffers that he had yet to repay.
The fraud resulted in a January FBI raid that seized documents from a Pennsylvania-based hospital, Politico reported.
While the female members of the Biden family have managed—thus far—to stay within the confines of the law, at least according to the public record, two have been accused of egregious conflicts of interest in which they benefited from their connections and status.
Valerie Biden Owens—the candidate’s sister and longtime campaign manager—routed millions in campaign “consulting” fees through a DC firm that also happened to have her on its payroll.
Biden’s daughter Ashley was able to rise through the ranks of a Deleware-based criminal-justice nonprofit after securing $166,000 in an exclusive federal grant administered, in large part, by her father.
Ashley’s husband, Howard Krein, also joined the family corruption business after using his family ties to secure a prominent White House meeting during the Obama administration to help launch a fledgling incubator and consulting service for healthcare startups.
Magnet for Scandal
Even setting aside his family corruption, Joe Biden’s own alarming record belies Booker’s claim that he will restore honor. Democrats have skated past his uncomfortable history of inappropriate touching, which frequently has involved young females.
Biden also weathered—or ducked—accountability for his insensitive racial remarks. Those span his early career with his support for pro-segregationist policies and politicians—along with his casual use of an offensive ‘n-word’—to his more recent claim that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids” during a recent Iowa campaign event.
Along the way, he’s received criticism for referring to his then-rival and future boss, Barack Obama, as a “storybook” for being “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
He also told a mixed-race audience that then-Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan sought to “put y’all back in chains” during a 2012 Virginia rally.
While his regular flubs—and possible dementia—may not signal moral turpitude, such Freudian slips offer a clear window into his true mindset when he isn’t prostituting his positions to the highest bidder.
Yet, one offense that does speak to Biden’s honor—at least, according to many a school and university “honor code” is the plagiarism scandal that derailed his first presidential campaign, when he lifted substantial portions of a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock without attribution.
Biden also has been caught in minor lies and embellishments repeatedly while on the campaign trail in his current run.
He downplayed such misstatements, saying the rhetorical flourishes and poetic liberties in his stump anecdotes were irrelevant to the substance of his campaign.
“Any gaffe that I have made—and I’ve made gaffes like every politician I know has—have been not about a substantive issue,” he claimed during a September 2019 appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
“They’ve been about other—I’m trying to talk about what other people have done,” he continued.
If Democratic voters are willing to cast aside their more immediate virtues on matters like race and gender for a more ‘electable’ but flawed candidate, then they certainly will have no scruples discarding anachronisms like “honesty.”
Even so, those throwing their support to Biden would be wise to acknowledge his shaky track record—lest they, too, find themselves caught in a lie of their own devising.