What's New - Carol Felsenthal
Published August 26, 2008 Chicago Sun-Times
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BY CAROL FELSENTHAL
... There is a feast of material that would make even the most partisan Obama backer question the wisdom of this choice.
Biden, then 44, was forced out of the 1988 presidential race...Biden had lifted almost verbatim... lines were lifted from a passionate speech delivered by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.
Not only did Biden not credit Kinnock, he fooled his audience by using the classic liar’s technique of burnishing a lie with detail...
Stealing from RFK
Biden also lifted words from Bobby Kennedy’s speeches — paragraphs that political junkies prized so much they knew them by heart.
Anyone following the primary campaign in 1987...
‘I have a much higher IQ’
There were a number of lies in this outburst and it was not long before they too were enumerated:
•
Biden got in trouble in 1965, during his first year in law school. He wrote a paper in which he lifted five pages verbatim from the Fordham Law Review. He was given an “F” in the course. He managed to avoid being bounced from law school, retook the course and earned a B.
• He claimed that he was “the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship.” He didn’t. He did have a half scholarship that was need-based.
• He did not graduate from law school in the top half of his class. He graduated 76th out of 85 — and he was near the bottom of his class all three years.
• If he won the moot court competition — and he claimed at the time that he actually did — he did not put it on his resume, surprising for a man prone to so egregiously exaggerating his accomplishments.
• He did not win the award for being the outstanding student in the political science department at Delaware, and he graduated with one degree, not three. He had a “C” average and graduated 506th in a class of 688.
There are other weird outbursts by Biden in more recent years...
Carol Felsenthal is a columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer, where this essay was posted.