Biden’s Bluff

Not learning from Elizabeth Warren’s recent faux pas, Joe Biden has leveled an attack at Bernie which is similarly ill conceived.
He’s bitching at campaign Sanders for spreading a ‘doctored’ video of him saying he agrees with Paul Ryan that cuts should be made to Medicare and Social Security. Specifically, that it’s a 20 second bit taken out of a longer speech, so there was context.
There are a few problems with this. For one, it’s his use of the word ‘doctored.’ The video was edited. It was not altered. The words coming out of Biden’s mouth were not changed or rearranged.
If he wants to show a longer clip for context, he could go ahead, but that would be opening up a can of worms that he does not want opened. There are longer clips of him speaking, in public, like this and this and this. They may not technically prove that Joe Biden is as senile as Abe Simpson, but they certainly indicate it. They definitely show that he is a rambling, unfocused, shambles of an old fool.
Also, there are lots of other videos of Joe Biden saying similar things. They are in the congressional record, and they are live, on the internet, part of our collective, retrievable memory. Yes, that’s a part of the political landscape now. Collective, retrievable memory.
Like Bernie Sanders himself, Biden has been in public life a long time and there is a lot of video evidence of positions he’s taken over his lifetime. This can be either a positive or a negative for an old candidate.
With Bernie, it makes him look good, even when his opponents are trying to make him look bad. When Trevor Noah showed that clip of Bernie Sanders telling a boy he thought he was dumb, and laughed and laughed and laughed, it took the cybermind about 2 seconds to find not only the extended version of the clip, but the whole darned TV show, “The Mayor Speaks” which is an absolute treasure trove of Bernie being cool back in the 80s.
With Biden, not so much.