In case you didn't know it, President Obama threw a big bone to Joe Biden this week awarding him our nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Joe Biden.
It is not my intent here to savage Old Joe. But please explain to me how this guy deserves this award. He was a senator and a vice president. As a senator, he was most prominent on the Senate Judiciary Committee when he was trying to block Republican Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. As vice president? What did he do?
Has Joe Biden saved any lives? Has he negotiated any major peace treaties to avert war? I don't think so. I get it though. This is like Hollywood inventing new awards to hand out to each other. I fear that this medal is becoming trivialized. Most recently, Obama handed them out to a bunch of people including Ellen DeGeneres and Vin Scully. Ernie Banks got one before he died. As a big fan of Banks and an admirer of Scully, who I grew up listening to as he broadcast Dodger games, it was nice to see them recognized. Even Ellen, silly as I think she is in her public persona, does a lot of good deeds.
But the nation's highest civilian award?
I invite anyone out there to explain how Biden gets this award.
That did strike me as nepotism. Biden got to be vice president because conventional wisdom had it that Barack Obama needed an old white male as a running mate. He would have done better with a Filipino woman.
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