Ol' Joe Biden has been waiting 17 long years, hoping the American public
would forget.
Back in 1988 Mr. Biden was running against Michael Dukakis for the
Democratic presidential nomination. But then it came to light that Mr.
Biden was lifting lines from the speeches of Robert Kennedy, Hubert
Humphrey, and others.
Where I come from, folks call that plagiarism. That, along with other
previous peccadilloes, drove Biden from the nomination race.
Time erases all bad memories, as they say, and now Mr. Biden is letting
on that he wants to join the 2008 presidential race.
But Mr. Biden has another stain on his ethical resumé. This fib is far
worse because it has the potential to rend the very foundations of the
social order. For the last 15 years, Biden has been saying that women,
and only women, can suffer from domestic violence.
Try telling that to the three young children of Clayton Carter, who
watched in horror as he was run over by his wife with their Ford SUV.
This past week Marquetta Jordan pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter
in Washington DC.
And consider Herman Winslow, who was shot and killed by Lena Driskell
when their yearlong romance came to an end. "I did it and I'd do it
again," Driskell yelled when the police came to her Atlanta home on June
10.
When women kill their husbands and ex-boyfriends, the media never use
the term, "domestic violence." That's because according to Mr. Biden,
only men commit DV.
Clayton Carter and Herman Winslow are just two of the 835,000 men who
are assaulted each year by their wives or girlfriends, according to
Department of Justice statistics.
Indeed, women are just as likely as men to commit partner aggression,
and men
suffer 38% of all DV-related injuries, according to the
research.
But Biden's silver-tongued oratory and cloak room arm-twisting counted
for more than the truth, and in 1994 President Clinton signed the first
Violence Against Women Act into law. That compelled the Department of
Justice to create a new bureaucracy, the Office on Violence Against
Women.
A lie is never static. A lie must always grow in order to stay one step
ahead of the skeptics.
So the billion-dollar-a-year VAWA has spawned even more falsehoods. It
wasn't enough to say that women were the exclusive victims of DV. Soon
we learned that violence against pregnant women was the leading cause of
birth defects, that half of all homeless women are on the streets
because of partner violence, and other propaganda-like
factoids.
Recently a hyperventilating Catherine MacKinnon, law professor at the
University of Michigan, compared partner aggression to the tragedy of
9/11: "Just like terrorist attacks, acts of violence against women are
carefully planned, targeted at civilians, and driven by ideology."
Eventually a lie becomes so bloated, so distorted, and so grotesque that
people begin to have their doubts.
Indiana University law professor Linda Kelly
recently
exposed the
neo-Marxist underpinnings of the DV industry. Kelly explained, "the
'discovery' of domestic violence is rooted in the essential feminist
tenet that society is controlled by an all-encompassing patriarchal
structure."
Earlier this year the non-partisan National Academy Science delivered
this stinging
critique of VAWA-funded programs: "the design of
prevention and control strategies.frequently is driven by ideology and
stakeholder interests rather than by plausible theories and scientific
evidence of cause."
Fox News columnist Wendy McElroy
lambasted
VAWA as a "hand-me-down from
the Clinton administration based on gender myths, anti-male bias and an
infatuation with Big Government."
And earlier this month columnist Phyllis Schlafly offered
this wish to
America's fathers: "Congress can help us celebrate Father's Day this
year by refusing to reauthorize the costly VAWA boondoggle."
For years the Democrats have clung to their receding power base by
playing on the fears and vulnerabilities of racial minorities. Now the
Dems are misleading women with the same red-meat rhetoric by saying they
live under the constant threat of being beaten and bloodied.
Thanks to DV-induced hysteria, laws make it possible to evict husbands
from their homes simply on the word of the woman. So it's no surprise
that so many eligible bachelors are refusing to marry. And it's no
coincidence that single women are far more likely than their married
counterparts to vote Democratic.
An ever-growing climate of fear, an unaccountable federal bureaucracy,
and a fading-away of the institution of marriage -- all that bodes well
for Senator Biden's presidential aspirations.
