Joe Biden’s greatest value to the Barack Obama administration thus far has been to out-gaffe the President in order to make his boss look better by comparison. Sensing that he had slacked off in recent days, Biden rushed to Raleigh, North Carolina, to take credit for federal funding a fire station received. Unfortunately, the funding came from George Bush, not Porkulus, as Biden claimed:
Biden and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced a new wave of $10.4 billion in federal stimulus money for home loans across the country, and billions more for essential services in rural communities such as Pikeville, which is getting money for a new fire station. Biden used the outdated, current station as a backdrop. Pikeville is just north of Goldsboro in Wayne County.
“We’re investing in places like this all across the country,” Biden said, “to demonstrate the vital role towns like this play in the recovery.”
Most of the money for the station that was announced Wednesday, however, had been secured last year under the Bush administration, according to fire department officials.
The man who actually got the money for the station took offense to Biden’s glory-hogging:
State Sen. David Rouzer, a Republican who represents Pikeville and worked in the Agriculture Department under President Bush, said he helped secure the fire department money last year out of the federal agency’s regular programs.
“They’re coming in and cherry picking the best projects and switching out the money, saying it’s stimulus money,” Rouzer said. “But it was already approved and in the pipeline. It’s totally disingenuous to come down here and say this is stimulus money, when regardless of whether a stimulus bill passed, they were getting the money.”
How much longer until Joe Biden credits Porkulus for the Hoover Dam, interstate highways, and Mount Rushmore?
Biden and Vilsack also promised low-cost home loans to buyers in the rural areas of North Carolina. That didn’t impress the attendees, either, who remembered what happened the last time government provided low-cost home loans to people who couldn’t otherwise get them:
A wave of new loans, though, sounds like a repeat of what created the recession, said John Tyndall, a volunteer firefighter and corn and soybean farmer who attended the Biden event.
“They gave out loans to people who couldn’t pay ’em back,” Tyndall said.
As Biden noted from FDR’s famous 1929 presidential television appearance, don’t worry about accuracy from government — just act grateful when we give you a little bit of your own money back, minus the standard 95% administrative fees.
Update: Spit-take comment of the day from Dr. Allecon:
Joe Biden claiming other people’s work as his own?
Hmmmm….I don’t think that’s ever happened before.
