by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
Citizen Journalist
Vice President Joe Biden is a good man, a man who has had to
shoulder way too much personal tragedy for one lifetime. Within a few weeks of being elected to the
Senate in 1972, but before he was actually sworn into office, Biden's wife, Neilia
and their three children were out in the family station wagon doing a bit of
Christmas shopping when Mrs. Biden inadvertently pulled into the path of a
tractor-trailer rig. She and the
couple’s very young daughter, Naomi, were killed. The two boys, Hunter and Joe, Jr (“Beau”)
had injuries that required hospitalization..
Beau, the most seriously injured, was still in the hospital when he
father was sworn into office the following month. That ceremony took place at the child’s
bedside.
(I was a young army officer serving on Okinawa at that time
and remember seeing a picture of the crumpled station wagon on the front page
of the Stars and Stripes. One of Biden’s campaign posters was still
visible in the car’s window.)
This week tragedy again struck the Biden family with the death
of Beau at age forty-six from brain cancer.
He was a married father of two, a lawyer, Iraq war veteran, former
attorney general of Delaware, and announced candidate for governor of
Delaware.
The grief of the Biden family must be unimaginable,
particularly for Joe who had previously lost his wife and another child.
Beau Biden’s funeral is today in Wilmington, Delaware. That should be the end to this very sad story
– but of course, it isn’t.
For some reason beyond the scope of normal human
understanding, the junior senator from Texas and Republican presidential
candidate, Ted Cruz, felt that the time was right to tell a Joe Biden joke at a
public meeting of Republicans in Michigan.
His attempt at humor did generate some laughter because Ted was obviously
not the only insensitive moron in the room.
A reporter asked the jolly jester if he thought his remark about the
Vice President had been appropriate, given that his son had just died – and
Ted’s response was to turn and walk away.
Later, after the incident began making its way into the national press –
Senator Cruz finally coughed up an apology – of sorts.
It’s hard to see how the joke (which wasn’t even that funny)
that Ted Cruz told to that Republican county gathering in Michigan could have
been anything other than a pre-planned and deliberate attack on a man and his
family who were struggling through the grieving process. Their loved one was dead – and had not even
been buried yet.
One is left to wonder if Senator Ted Cruz, like Senator Joe
McCarthy from sixty years before, has any sense of decency.
Senator Cruz’s blatant disrespect of the Biden family was
quickly overshadowed by disrespect from another source. The forever ungodly Westboro Baptist cult of
Topeka announced they were packing their bags and heading to Delaware to picket
the funeral of Beau Biden. The
sacrilegious organization has a long history of disrupting the funerals of
veterans and America’s war dead – and young Biden had served in Iraq. But not being content with just slandering
the dead, a spokesman for the group also used the family’s fatal car accident
from forty years earlier as evidence of God’s displeasure with the Vice
President himself.
I understand the importance of free speech, but it is sad
beyond measure to see that constitutionally-guaranteed liberty being abused
solely for the purpose of inflicting additional pain on those who are already
suffering.
Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy has long since passed from the
scene, but his legacy of a lack of common decency oozes on – a cold slime from a dark, dark time.
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