Biden-brains

If you're paying attention to the John Roberts hearings today, you probably heard Joe Biden making a complete jerk of himself by first asking Judge Roberts dumbassed questions, then refusing to let him answer by repeatedly interrupting him, then, when Chairman Specter all but konked him on the head with the gavel complained that Roberts was giving "misleading answers" (How the hell could he tell?) and attempting to "filibuster" - a line that triggered gales of laughter from the gallery.

I love Jonah Goldberg's characterization of this exchange and Biden's all-around assholery:

Folks, I am not deeply invested in the proposition that Biden is a smart guy. But I do think he is, particularly given the pool of people - Senators - we have to compare him too. Professor Bainbridge agrees with Kathryn (and a passle of emailers) that Biden's so dumb he'd try to drown a fish....

But, again, what's fascinating - and what might be distracting some folks from seeing his underlying-yet-occassional smarts - is that he lets his ego and vanity get in the way. The man loves his voice so much, you'd expect him to be following it around in a grey Buick, in defiance of restraining ordder, as it walks home from school. He seems to think his teeth are some kind of hypnotic punctuation marks which can momentarily disorient the listener and absolve him from any of Western civilization's usual imperatives to stop talking. Listening to him speechify is like playing an intellectual game of whack-a-mole where every now and then the fuzzy head of a good point pops up from the tundra but before you can pin it down, he starts talking about how he went to the store and saw a squirrel on the way and it was brown which brings to mind Brown v. Board of Ed which most people don't understand because [TEETH FLASH] he taught Brown in his law school course and [TEETH FLASH] Mr. Chairman I'm going to get right to it and besides these aren't the droids you're looking for....

John Roberts is a cro magnon man being interrogated by a panel of ten eunuchs and eight drooling Neanderthals. His encylopedic knowledge and verbal skill and unflappable poise in the face of the execrable demogoguery of tottering, dottering, senile old fools like Kennedy and Leahy, ignorant scumbags like Schumer and Durbin and Biden, and the ballbreaker who looks moderate only by comparison to the other senator from California would be inspiring if not for the effrontery of having to put up with such outrages in the first place.

And it's almost certainly nothing more than an obnoxious formality.

Senator Cornyn mustered the stones to take a bite out of his "distinguished colleague from Delaware":

During his questions to Judge Roberts, Senator Biden just excoriated the judge for refusing to answer the same questions that Justice Ginsburg answered. Judge Roberts explained that Justice Ginsburg sometimes answered questions about issues that might come before the Court because she had already written on those issues and therefore had already expressed a view.

Senator Biden then stated that he would ask Judge Roberts about a question that Ginsburg had answered but not written on: whether or not she agreed with Justice Powell's opinion in Moore v. City of East Cleveland. Judge Roberts respectfully declined to answer because it could come back be the Court.

Biden then suggested that Roberts was violating the Ginsburg standard because Ginsburg had not written on the Moore case. But that’s inaccurate, as Justice Ginsburg herself explained (in her testimony before Senator Biden’s committee):

"In taking the position I have in all of my writings on this subject, I must associate myself with Justice Powell's statements; otherwise, I could not have written what I did." (Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, pg. 271)

So Biden is a dimwit, a plagiarist, AND a liar. Quite a trifecta.

Did you know that during the Ginsberg hearings, when Senator Hairplugs was Judiciary Committee Chairman, he specifically told her that she didn't have to answer questions pertaining to how she would rule on specific cases or issues? Which helped conceal, among other things, her belief in constitutional rights to polygamy and prostitution, and her support for a sexual age of legal consent of twelve. And yet it's Roberts that "Slow Joe" and his fellow-travelers demand prejudge by the litmus numbers and try to paint as an "extremist" whether or not he obliges - when he can get in a word edgewise.

This blurb from B4B's live-blog of this blabatorial combat is, I think, a good synopsis of the hours and hours of pompous bloviating:

The Democrat strategy is quite clear... paint Roberts as an extremist... cherry-pick quotes, and complain about how Roberts is answering questions... Biden felt it necessary to waste 7 or 8 minutes rambling at the beginning of his half hour, and had the nerve get irritated when his time was running out at the end... It's bound to get worse... Specter has only had to interject himself when a Democrat was badgering Roberts. They ask longwinded questions, they don't get the answers they want, and they interrupt. This all feels like a set up... They are going to claim dissatisfaction with Roberts' answering of questions and use that to either a) justify voting against him or b) justify a filibuster.

They'll filibuster if they can muster the votes, which may be more difficult now since Roberts is replacing Rehnquist instead of O'Connor. But this week-long atrocity is as much about deterring the President from sending up another conservative (particularly one like JR) as it is stopping the Chief Justice-designate himself.

Given Senator Sessions' spot-on description yesterday of the Democrat strategy as pro-forma character assassination, one is tempted to wonder why this detestable display should be intimidating to either the White House or majority Republicans since what the Donks saying now will be pretty much repeated verbatim several weeks from now. And the GOPers have the power to, you know, ban confirmation filibusters.

The prospect of which drives them to facial expressions like this: