By Selwyn Duke

One of the most important qualities in a leader — in fact, in anyone
who must manage, and negotiate with, people — is having a feel for man’s
nature. This brings us to what has not yet been explored about Joe
Biden’s bizarre behavior at last night’s vice-presidential debate: what
it tells us about his grasp of reality.

For the record, it’s clear to me that Biden’s overtly obnoxious,
condescending manner was the result of an act. But the vice president is
a phony from way back. In 1988, it was discovered
that he plagiarized a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock
and, even more incredibly, appropriated elements of Kinnock’s life
story to weave his own false life narrative. This forced Biden to quit
the ‘88 presidential race, yet people today consider him qualified to be
a heartbeat from the presidency.

If time heals all leftists’ scandals, however, it doesn’t heal all
their character defects. As recently as 2007, Biden was falsely claiming
that his wife and daughter were killed by a drunk driver in 1972. Now,
they were killed in an auto accident, a tragedy any which way you slice
it. And a surviving loved one has every moral right to talk about how
such an event affected him — assuming he is sincere. But is this a
logical assumption in Biden’s case, when he clearly embellished his
tragedy for campaign-trail consumption? It’s reminiscent of Al Gore’s
story about how his sister’s 1984 lung-cancer death inspired him to
become an ardent foe of big tobacco, when in reality he was trumpeting his tobacco exploits while running for the presidency four years later.

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