Grief Without Wisdom: Joe Biden’s Empty
Authenticity
By Chris Floyd
September 14, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
I’m very sorry Joe Biden’s son died recently.
I truly am. I know it’s a deep, genuine pain, “overwhelming,” as he
told Stephen Colbert, and he will carry it the rest of his life. But
when I see all our
earnest media progressives gushing over Joe’s “authenticity”
in sharing that pain on national TV, I also think of the
hundreds of thousands of people who lost children and other kith and
kin in a pointless war that Joe not only voted for, but also
actively encouraged with heated Senate hearings that whipped up war
fever.
That faithful service to the demented war aims of
the Bush Administration was also the “authentic” Joe Biden in
action. Yet now we have many of the same earnest progressives who
fiercely opposed that war, who eloquently denounced the invasion and
diligently catalogued the monstrous crimes and follies of the
occupation, praising one of its chief bipartisan architects for his
“authenticity” in speaking of precisely the kind of grief he helped
inflict on thousands upon thousands upon thousands of innocent
people. The parade of such people who are grieving for their losses
as deeply and genuinely as Biden is grieving — and because of
actions that Biden directly and eagerly abetted — would take days on
end to pass across Stephen Colbert’s stage, where Joe sat in comfort
and basked in the sympathy of the nation. For each one of these —
whose human pain is the equivalent of Biden’s — to sit down and tell
their story as he did would take years on end.
But who would listen? Who would care? No one cared
then — Joe Biden certainly didn’t, when he was recklessly peddling
cooked intelligence and bellicose bombast, and warning of the
“imminent danger” posed by the broken, bombed-out, hedged-in,
already half-occupied country of Iraq. He didn’t worry about the
suffering to come for individuals who loved their children exactly
as he loved his. And he didn’t worry about that suffering when it
came to pass in the war he helped engender.
But now he has lost a child, another child; his
young daughter was killed long ago, with her mother, in a car
accident. Now he grieves again. And now he is a hero of
“authenticity” for many progressives, who declare that this
authenticity alone qualifies him to be president. Yet it looks as if
this new grief has taught him nothing, given him no insight into the
suffering of others. It has not led him, a religious believer, to a
conviction of his sins, to an awareness of the cruel and pointless,
endless horror he helped inflict on multitudes of innocent people —
a horror that continues to this day, as the blood and chaos spawned
by the war he supported continues to produce fresh victims without
ceasing, every hour, in an ever-widening circle.
If Joe Biden’s grief, authentic as it is, does not
lead him to a confrontation with the terrible crime that sits in the
center of his soul, then what good is it to anyone? What good is it
to him, or to the son he’s lost? Without that insight, that
conviction, without confession and recantation and acts of
expiation, his televised grief and private suffering will be as
pointless and meaningless as the war that he and Bush and Cheney and
Hillary created.
“What doth it profit, my brethren, though a
man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him? But
wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?”
— James 2:14, 20
Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque -
http://www.chris-floyd.com/