Joe Biden stumbled out of his call-center cubicle yesterday and decided to do something idiotic again. What did the human embarrassment dothistime? Oh, just attack some low-paid government biologists for working really hard on an endangered species website that costs all of $125 a year -- that's a hundred-and-twenty-five dollars. Hmm, that sounds a little bit like a number Joe Bidenlovesto spend, but you need to add nine zeroes, because that's what this administration spends killing American troops and robot-bombing random villagers in Afghanistan, every year: $125 billion . But spending .000000001% of that -- about the price of the average household's monthly cell-phone bill -- to maintain a website about the endangered state animal of California and Nevada, the beloved desert tortoise, nowthat'ssomething Joe Biden doesn't care for at all. He sent an email about this, to everyone, to show what a jabbering imbecile he is.
(Yes, this is your former editor. Sorry, I had to come out of retirement for a few minutes, to deal with this.)
While everything from kids' school lunches to Medicare is chipped away by the false crisis of "The Deficit," the never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the other four or five Muslim countries currently being million-dollar-bombed around the clock never seem to run out of American Money. Afghanistan is costing $125billionper year, if you believe the Pentagon's own numbers, which not even the Pentagon believes.
But Joe Biden doesn't care about that. He's too busy signing off on failed attempts at cutesy emails full of his staffers' attempts at mean-spirited humor -- jabs directed at low-paid U.S. biologists who are using their expensive college educations to protect America's natural resources. As if the scientists who work for their nation's government didn't get enough abuse from the Bush administration over the last decade, now they've got to deal with Joe Biden mocking them for doing their jobs on a shoestring budget?
The San Francisco Business Journal reports on this obnoxious thing sent out by the vice president:
“Most of the cuts we are going to make are small. They won’t close the deficit or solve our fiscal problems.”
One of the budget outrages he listed? A website for the endangered Desert Tortoise.
“I bet you didn’t know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I’m sure it’s a wonderful species,” Biden said.
Did you LOL at Biden's stupid jab? Of course not. But we bet you felt something. Disgust, probably.
Thanks to Wonkette operative "Jerry," we know exactly how much the website in question costs: $125 a year, plus a few hours of a hard-working scientist's extra, unpaid time. You know, so that there might be some accurate information online about a threatened species -- a species that has been here in America for millions of years, yet has declined by about 90% just in the last three decades.
With the Obama Administration's fast-tracking of solar farms in environmentally critical western wilderness, the desert tortoise population in the American deserts is literally being dug up by bulldozers right now, because the orders from this administration have been to ignore environmental concerns. (Solar power is good and necessary and the West has no lack of "disturbed land" for all the renewable energy this country could ever need, but building hundred-mile-wide power plants atop unspoiled wilderness is moronic.)
The White House is so ham-fisted when it comes to environmental matters that former Arizona governor and Clinton-era Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt came out of retirement last week to bash Obama for running an administration that is rivaling the Bush-Cheney administration in its hostility toward public lands and endangered species.
Not that it will change this administration's terrible environmental record, but Joe Biden owes a personal apology to the government biologists who maintain that very useful website. And then he should go back to Delaware and shut his ignorant mouth for good. [ BizJournals / AFP / DesertTortoise.gov ]
"I always took my role as a leader ... very seriously"
Ken Lay
I wonder how much the staffer was paid in the course of researching and writing. Whether or not it rises to the whopping $125 mark, I am in favor of a budget cut here.