Saturday, July 8th, 2006...8:08 am
Joe Biden on Small Business Owners of South-Asian Descent
Sen. Joe Biden was caught saying something incredibly stupid and offensive on a broadcast of Road to the White House:
I’ve had a great relationship. In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.
Um, yeah. Great.
I’ve always considered Biden, the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to graduate from college, an arrogant jackass. Coupled with that arrogance has been an incredible breadth of knowledge of foreign policy. Unfortunately, for the next few weeks, all the press is going to give a darn about is this dumbass statement.
As expected, the Democratic-leaning USINPAC is saying that the statement is not offensive, while the Indian American Republican Council finds it incredibly offensive. Funny thing with the IARC, they don’t seem to have any problem with the villifying of Indian-American H1B Visa holders by Lou Dobbs and other prominent opponents of immigration, but they have a press release taking offense to Sen. Robert Byrd’s not-even-year-long membership in the Ku Klux Klan more than sixty years ago.
Well, I guess this sort of thing is to be expected. The thing I’m finding funny is that this becomes yet another reason for conservatives to themselves claim that they are an opressed minority group. Typical of these is this from a man named Kevin Martin of something called Project 21:
If one is conservative, even the most minor perceived slight can earn a place on the hot seat…Such generalizations are expected on “The Simpsons,” but not so from the next potential leader of the free world. Unless, maybe, if you’re a liberal.
Funny, Biden says something offensive about Indian-Americans, but almost immediately, conservative commentators paint themselves as the victims. This is the sort of whining that, from a liberal, inspires epithets like “lefty bed-wetter” and “crybaby” from the conservatives.
I agree that what Biden says was offensive, but I can’t take the conservative hand-wringing seriously. As soon as they make a serious effort to get rid of the racists in their own ranks, and stop trying to appeal to them, I’ll start to listen. My problem is, when a Republican office holder says something offensive like this, it is much more likely to be backed up by actual policy.
NB – Interestingly, the IARC press release on Byrd says that he was a “Grand Dragon” of the Klan, which is false. In the sixty years since, Byrd has regretted his membership in the Klan, which lasted a few months, and managed to get a 100% rating from the NAACP.
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