White House: When Biden said he “fully understands” China’s one-child policy, he totally meant the opposite
posted at 7:25 pm on August 23, 2011 by Allahpundit
This excuse wouldn’t fly for any other public figure in Washington, but when you remember that this is a guy who greeted Gabby Giffords by welcoming her to the “Cracked Head Club,” the idea that he means exactly the opposite of what he says doesn’t seem so implausible.
Maybe during that Democratic caucus meeting on the debt ceiling he really meant that tea partiers have acted like patriots?
As I mentioned in my previous post, I contacted the White House this afternoon for an explanation of Vice President Biden’s stunning remarks regarding China’s odious one-child policy. Moments ago, I received the following on-the-record statement from Biden’s press secretary, Kendra Barkoff:
“The Obama Administration strongly opposes all aspects of China’s coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization. The Vice President believes such practices are repugnant. He also pointed out, in China, that the policy is, as a practical matter, unsustainable. He was arguing against the One Child Policy to a Chinese audience.”
Not to nitpick, but that’s not strictly true. He didn’t tell the Chinese that their one-child policy is unsustainable. He told them that forcing each young Chinese wage-earner to support four elderly grandparents is unsustainable. (Which is true.) If China’s willing to thin the herd on the front end, who knows? Maybe they’ll start thinning it on the back end too to bring the grandchild/grandparent ratio into line. If you think rationing of health care to seniors is a frightening concept in the U.S. and UK, wait until the ChiComs put their distinctive brand on it.
Grim jokes aside, we all know why Biden said what he said and it has little to do with his personal feelings about mandatory sterilization. Exit quotation from Mark Steyn: “They have our soul who have our bonds.”
Blowback
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This won’t see the light of day on Lame Stream Media. They will be focusing only on any slight slip up of Bachmann, Palin, Perry, or Romney.
Star20 on August 23, 2011 at 7:30 PM
Unlike the undialected negro he works for, Biden is neither clean nor articulate.
abobo on August 23, 2011 at 7:30 PM
My stomach literally gurgled at that thought.
JohnGalt23 on August 23, 2011 at 7:30 PM
When they say “workers’ paradise” they are referring specifically to those who are currently working.
pedestrian on August 23, 2011 at 7:31 PM
The filter get me? ah well, this must be what sharia and/or communism is going to be like, whichever comes first.
abobo on August 23, 2011 at 7:31 PM
That’s some brutally good Steyn at the link.
Reading about the recent round of forced abortions in China, it made me sick to think that we can’t even condemn China because our greed has made slaves us.
joewm315 on August 23, 2011 at 7:32 PM
Culture of death? What culture of death?
Vera on August 23, 2011 at 7:32 PM
So the policy is a good thing in a repugnant sort of way.
MJBrutus on August 23, 2011 at 7:33 PM
Living in China. The ultimate “Death Panel”.
CTSherman on August 23, 2011 at 7:33 PM
That Steyn piece is really good.
JohnGalt23 on August 23, 2011 at 7:33 PM
He understands it because it’s the goal of 0bamacare as well. If you think government “healthcare” is going to continue to allow multi-child families, you’re very naive. Their ultimate goal is population control.
SouthernGent on August 23, 2011 at 7:34 PM
This is why Obama will never quit. He hates America. He doesn’t hate it enough to leave the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania in this idiot’s hands.
angryed on August 23, 2011 at 7:34 PM
Someone needs to set ole Uncle Joe down again and explain how satellites and the 24 hour news feed works again.
Koa on August 23, 2011 at 7:36 PM
As a child growing up, never in my wildest estimations did I think we’d ever live in such scary times.
It’s not enough that liberals believe in a utopian world, where everyone is plastered with a smile, and no one is poor…but nope. That’s not enough. Now they believe themselves to be God. They decide who lives, who dies.
May God have mercy!
capejasmine on August 23, 2011 at 7:36 PM
I say just let dear joe loose saying all he wants. It takes the wh press to try to un-do all his mouth says when he opens it. I am trying to figure out who is the biggest open mouth insert foot, bho or joe?
L
letget on August 23, 2011 at 7:37 PM
Slow Joe’s staff had to blow into Plug’s head to keep his head from collasping, what a moron.
skanter on August 23, 2011 at 7:37 PM
This….can you say eugenics/population control/only the strong survive (to pay taxes)/? The really bad thing is, if biteme had one single brain cell in that plug filled head of his, I would say be afraid, be very afraid. Jeez
sicoit on August 23, 2011 at 7:38 PM
I believe the opposite is true. Obama does hate America and Americans, and that’s why he’d never quit. He’s not about to lose a position that grants him the power to destroy that which he hates.
capejasmine on August 23, 2011 at 7:38 PM
Obama bows… Biden just sucks up. Every day, Biden gets more and more like Larry Tate, Darren’s sychphantic boss on “Bewitched.” Couldn’t pucker up fast enough.
VastRightWingConspirator on August 23, 2011 at 7:38 PM
They usually are. The man is brilliant!
MJBrutus on August 23, 2011 at 7:40 PM
I’m tellin’ you the WH will not cross this guy. He is an idiot but he’s also an idiot who’s very well-connected with the people who are connected. There’s a lot of stuff in it but the little part that rings truest in a book called I Heard You Paint Houses is the part about who lent an assist to Biden to get him his first term, and how. Check it out.
curved space on August 23, 2011 at 7:40 PM
I think Biden is just a goof who doesn’t really know what he’s saying. He doesn’t seem to say things maliciously like Obama does.
My mom is convinced that he just hasn’t been the same since his brain aneurysms and I think she’s right.
Common Sense on August 23, 2011 at 7:41 PM
When they say “workers’ paradise” they are referring specifically to those WHO ARE IN CHARGE.
FIFY
GarandFan on August 23, 2011 at 7:42 PM
Joe just bought Obama a trainload of grief with the left – they love forced abortion and sterilization, when it’s carried out on the “right” people.
Gator Country on August 23, 2011 at 7:45 PM
“Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.” – Joe Biden
The contempt these people show for us is truly astounding. I know these idiots think we’re stupid, but c’mon!
RadClown on August 23, 2011 at 7:46 PM
Oh, and when Biden says “No coal!”, he means YES! And when Biden says “Obama’s not going to take my shotgun away”, he means Obama IS going to take it? And when Biden calls the Tea Party “terrorists”, he actually means that they are patriots?
Okay, glad I got that straight now.
GarandFan on August 23, 2011 at 7:46 PM
good catch
pedestrian on August 23, 2011 at 7:47 PM
The closest we have to “One Child” is “Every Child a Wanted Child”. The effects on entitlements are identical — it will be the conservatives, in the end, providing the children to support Social Security and Medicare. Hopefully our children will have our values, and will know what to do.
unclesmrgol on August 23, 2011 at 7:48 PM
Yes, Joe should have avoided the one child policy comments, however liberal women are nowhere to be found – as usual.
China’s unwanted girls
A boy on a cart, Beijing
Boys are considered much more useful than girls
By Adam Brookes in Beijing
On the garbage dumps that surround Beijing, scavengers from time to time will find a newborn baby girl amid the stinking refuge.
Sometimes she is still alive.
Boys are the best, because they can work
Zhang Hongying, mother
Chen Rong makes her living from scavenging garbage, and over the years she has found five little girls on the tips.
She brought them all home to her one-room brick shack and she and her husband try to give them a chance.
In China, couples are permitted one, at most two, children. Too frequently a girl is a disappointment.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1506469.stm
This has been known for decades, and yet little is said. But Joe had to comment …… epic fail, a$$hat. Always wrong. Always inept. Always excused.
Cody1991 on August 23, 2011 at 7:48 PM
‘He told them that forcing each young Chinese wage-earner to support four elderly grandparents is unsustainable.’ Isn’t this the same ponzi scheme that we have called SS? Aren’t Death Panels called for in Ocare? We’re light years ahead of the Chicoms.
Kissmygrits on August 23, 2011 at 7:53 PM
I don’t know that they’ll go that far…because they won’t need to. Unless I’m very wrong China’s healthcare system has no laws compelling you to free treatment (unlike America) if you can’t afford it.
Uncle Sams Nephew on August 23, 2011 at 7:54 PM
AP, if you wanna compete with Ed, just come up with a Bidenism of the day.
Lanceman on August 23, 2011 at 7:55 PM
So when you cut the birth-rate to a non-replacement rate for… 40 years is it now?… that means that those who were in their late teens, then, are now in their late 50′s today.
What happens when that large workforce gets downsized by natural causes over the next decade?
Population crash isn’t the half of it.
Who will grow China’s food as many of those older people are the poor, illiterate farmers. Their sons and daughters escaped from the farms for city jobs… to raise families that can’t replace them. And there aren’t enough of those trying to raise a family to replace their parents.
Then there is the splendid news that one of the Communist State’s most crony organizations, Foxconn, which used to run huge dormitory facilities and pay a pittance for workers to sleep 6 to a room… why they realized that it was cheaper just to put machines into the production line. So all those 20/30/40/50-somethings are getting turned out… and they have zero farming skills.
How can you be a dominant world power when your population is crashing and you are running out of people to grow your food for you? And that isn’t to speak of the pollution and actual agricultural problems like a dustbowl going on in central China. China is going to need all that foreign cash.
And soon, very soon, you will be competing with the Chinese government for food.
How’s that Nannystate working out for the US, anyways?
ajacksonian on August 23, 2011 at 7:56 PM
Sadly the explanation is “Say whatever you want. You’re a Dem. We’ll go around telling people what you MEANT to say after we’re done laughing/crying as the case may be.”
DrAllecon on August 23, 2011 at 7:56 PM
I wonder if Obama feels any remorse over his Hoya basketball team getting beaten up because he was too busy vacationing to give the Chinese the time of day. He sent his boy over there and the Chicomsreacted to the slight most aggressively. It tough figuring out who to root for in the melee and that tells all that needs telling about the state of American political discourse. Obamahas set back race relations fifty years. What a collosal failure the obama presidencyhas been.
pc on August 23, 2011 at 7:57 PM
Idiot.
jeffersonschild on August 23, 2011 at 7:59 PM
Not even close.
China’s problem was created in a few decades by their population laws and all the misogynist SOB’s who want a Golden Boychild and refuse anything else.
Our problem was created over most of a century, by not adapting SS at all from the days of an agrarian nation where farm families with a dozen children were common. That’s gone out with the horse and buggy, but both lawmakers and citizens refuse to acknowledge the fact and change the system.
Uncle Sams Nephew on August 23, 2011 at 8:00 PM
You know, “period” etc.
Axe on August 23, 2011 at 8:00 PM
He didn’t call the Tea Party terrorists either…I bet they get tired of “clarifying” his statements.
d1carter on August 23, 2011 at 8:03 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh1xF9XFW70&feature=player_embedded#!
Levin’s take on Sissy Wallace and choke cherry Biden.
Keemo on August 23, 2011 at 8:05 PM
Joe Biden, the Ed McMahon of Vice Presidents.
DrStock on August 23, 2011 at 8:06 PM
I don’t know why you gotta insult Ed McMahon.
Axe on August 23, 2011 at 8:08 PM
What is wrong with the people in Delaware?
SlaveDog on August 23, 2011 at 8:13 PM
Nothing wrong with the one child policy. If China hadn’t instituted that, they’d have hundreds of millions of more poor peasants right now and that wouldn’t be good for China or for anybody else. I can think of a few places that should have a zero child policy. A few cities come to mind.
keep the change on August 23, 2011 at 8:15 PM
You want frightening, check out the comments on this story at Huffpo. Who are these people?
ctmom on August 23, 2011 at 8:15 PM
Interesting article on C4P on this topic. http://t.co/bICbCQG
Biden is a coward and a moron.
Naturally Curly on August 23, 2011 at 8:25 PM
Today’s Democrat Party.
Scary, aren’t they?
Del Dolemonte on August 23, 2011 at 8:26 PM
Biden was for it before he was jerked by the collar and told to be against it…
Hog Wild on August 23, 2011 at 8:28 PM
How Progressive of you.
Naturally Curly on August 23, 2011 at 8:28 PM
Curiously, he shot a 58 on the front nine.
JammieWearingFool on August 23, 2011 at 8:28 PM
And Mao could do that easily without reloading… oh… wait… the topic isn’t genocide by governmental decree, is it?
ajacksonian on August 23, 2011 at 8:38 PM
He’s a national disgrace, a national grace…
Dhuka on August 23, 2011 at 8:44 PM
Historically, as long as the country in question has enough young males (as China does right now), they hand each of the “excess” males a uniform and a rifle.
And then choose the neighboring country they are going to take over, and loot.
It worked perfectly well for Napoleon’ Bonaparte, for a while. (Granted, the Directory helped create the mess France was in under his rule.) It took an alliance of states that normally hated each others’ guts (Britain, Austria, etc.) to break him.
In China’s case, there is a long tradition of this sort of high-stakes gamesmanship, going back to Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai. China tried to invade Japan in the 13th Century, and failed mostly due to a typhoon in the Sea of Japan which wrecked most of their invasion fleet. (It is called “the Divine Wind”, in Japanese history- or, in the Tongue of Heaven, Kamikaze. Now you know where that word came from.)
In more recent eras, China has invaded or attempted to invade practically every nation they share a border with at one time or another. They conquered Tibet in the late 1950s, and even fought a brief war with the USSR along their common border in the late 1960s. (Most P.C. historians refer to it as a “disagreement”; “disagreements” generally do not involve artillery duels.)
While China today does not have the naval amphib or force-projection capability to, say, take on Japan again, they are separated from Siberia (and all its untapped mineral wealth) by only the Amur River. And the People’s Liberation Army is very good at crossing rivers. (They learned it from the Russians, as a matter of fact.)
In Russia’s present military state of affairs, there isn’t much they could do about the PLA moving north and putting up “Under New Management” signs, not least because any defense or counterattack they could mount would be at the thin end of a very long logistics train- namely the Trans-Siberian Railway. Vladivostok is easily cut off from the shoreside, especially if the Chinese PLA gets some “voluntary” help from the North Korean PLA- and I wouldn’t bet against it.
Russia’s only effective option might be to go to what the old “Escalation Ladder” called “Theater Nuclear War”- but then, China has nukes, too. Including at least a few missiles that can reach Moscow.
In a scenario like this, which could be all too real, all too soon, the deciding factor is mainly just how much the old men in the Forbidden City think they can get away with.
As it stands now, the answer to that may be “quite a lot”.
clear ether
eon
eon on August 23, 2011 at 8:48 PM
Bo Bo da clown!
Hummer53 on August 23, 2011 at 8:53 PM
Aren’t liberals fans of eugenics? I think Biden 100% supports this kind of genetic and social manipulation.
MrX on August 23, 2011 at 8:55 PM
All those extra boys? Cannon fodder, the Commies don’t sweat a few million dead if it advances their cause,
Bob
Bobnormal on August 23, 2011 at 9:15 PM
Let’s be direct. The White Mosque is lying. In the past 48 hours, we’ve heard three different boneheaded remarks from people on the left, but I’m certain the teller coaster ride isn’t over.
madmonkphotog on August 23, 2011 at 9:59 PM
Will somebody tell me who the F is actually running the Executive branch of our government these days?!
Seriously, it’s not President Vacation, it’s sure as hell not Vice President Foot-in-Mouth, can’t be Madame Smart Power or Attorney General Gunrunner, so who the hell is it?!
SuperCool on August 23, 2011 at 10:07 PM
I have no doubt that Valerie Jarrett is little Bammie’s brain.
slickwillie2001 on August 23, 2011 at 11:14 PM
Sad. How much more intelligent Biden used to sound back in the days when he stuttered….
opaobie on August 23, 2011 at 11:25 PM
I hate to support Biden on much of anything, particularly subtle verbal knifings. However….
I guess I am tone deaf or something. I, too, can understand why China did it. They were more panicked about too many people to feed more than they were disgusted over the abortions that went with it. I saw Biden’s closing comment as sticking the knife in and twisting. They’ve set themselves up for an utterly unsustainable future in about 30 or 40 years. They were utterly dumb (censoreds).
People are not wise enough to take their one child and accept it either gender. So they practice infanticide and abortion to ensure getting a boy. And if they have that boy and the wife gets pregnant again they are forced into an abortion.
And the nation is being punished for its leaders’ stupidity when they come up against “who takes care of the elderly”. (And it’s two parents for each child to take care of. It’s only four if the married son’s wife does not work.
But wait, the punishment is even more complete. With such a great majority of male children who cannot find wives, what happens when THEY get old? Who takes care of them?
In 60 years China is set to flame out. India wins.
In one simple observation Biden stuck the knife into the Chinese government’s (lack of) soul and twisted.
He told them that forcing each young Chinese wage-earner to support four elderly grandparents is unsustainable. That was a masterpiece of understatement.
Considering it was Biden who did this – yeah, there is a chance for another interpretation. This is, however, the way *I* would “needle them with a broadsword.”
{^_^}
herself on August 24, 2011 at 6:11 AM
We should count our blessings.
The last time Slow Joe said something this stupid while overseas was when he happened to notice an apartment building being built in Jerusalem. Because this Administration is incapable of admitting an error, it became a cornerstone of our Israel policy that Israel immediately stop all construction, even it it’s own territory.
So, if they had held true to form, we would not be embracing China’s One-Child rule as a matter of policy. They would probably wind up incorporating it into Obamacare (if it’s not in there already)…
Haiku Guy on August 24, 2011 at 6:15 AM
No, you are not tone deaf, that statement of yours is offensive.
The government wish for certain policy, they can either reward or punish their people’s behavior. And mostly through education (i.e. brainwashing, indoctrination) to gradually change the habbit.
In this case the Chinese have to FORCE people to comply, with the heavy OR ELSE!, and the people have no way of objecting to the policy (by voting them in the government out).
Guess you are ok with the totalitarianism concept – in your case as long as the reason or outcome is to your liking.
Sir Napsalot on August 24, 2011 at 12:32 PM
Stand up Chuck!
bbordwell on August 24, 2011 at 12:46 PM