Biden's Foot-in-Mouth Disease

Joe Biden is no Slick Willie.

He tries to be smooth and unflustered, but he fails.

On Friday, Biden was all over cable TV -- MSNBC and CNN -- attempting to explain his questionable comment about Indian-Americans. He insisted that it was actually meant to be a compliment and not a racially-charged slur.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Facing criticism, potential 2008 presidential candidate Joe Biden on Friday defended his recent remark that "you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent."

The Delaware senator said his words were taken out of context.

That can happen. A portion of a statement can be cherry-picked, taken out of context, and presented in a fashion to do damage to the speaker.

A clear case of a remark being completely misconstrued was Bill Bennett's supposed proposal that the way to reduce crime in the U.S. would be to abort black babies.

Bennett's statement was taken out of context and distorted by Democrats and their willing accomplices in the lib media. That, of course, didn't stop elected officials and civil rights leaders from condemning Bennett FOR SOMETHING THAT HE NEVER SAID.

In Biden's case, however, it's still not clear what he really meant when he said, "You cannot go into a Dunkin Donuts or a 7-Eleven unless you have a slight Indian accent."

Friday, on CNN's The Situation Room:

The senator said he has had an "incredibly strong" relationship with the Indian-American community in Delaware and that his comment was misinterpreted.

"I was making the point that up until now in my state, we've had a strong Indian community made up of leading scientists and researchers and engineers," Biden said. Lately, he said: "We're having middle-class people move to Delaware, take over Dunkin' Donuts, take over businesses, just like other immigrant groups have, and I was saying that ... they're growing, it's moving."

I think that's a stretch.

Biden was trying to get his foot out of his mouth by claiming that he was praising the immigrants from India.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with saluting legal immigrants for making a life for themselves in the U.S., but he certainly didn't have to play into the "Apu at the Kwik-E-Mart" stereotype to do it.



Not only did he fail to adequately account for his regrettable use of racial stereotyping in his reference to Indian-Americans, but while he was in CYA mode, Biden made still another generalization. This time, he targeted Italian-Americans.

"I could have said that 40 years ago about walking into a delicatessen and saying an Italian accent in my state," Biden added.

So according to Biden, in the mid-1960s, the delis in Delaware were all run by Italian-Americans with accents.

I didn't realize that a lot of Italians settled in Delaware during the 60s and opened delis.

Biden just can't seem to stop stereotyping. It's like a sickness with him.

What's next?

I guess Biden will have to offer Italian-Americans an explanation, too.

I think it would probably be wise for Biden to just give it a rest. If he tried to give a non-apology apology to Italian-Americans, he may offend yet another racial, ethnic, or religious group in the process.

He's on a roll.