In June 1974 — 49 years ago — Joe Biden sat for a profile in Washingtonian by Kitty Kelley. Biden, never a man who could control his mouth, got some blowback at the time for the naked ambition on display.

Some things don’t change. He already had a distinctive way of expressing the loss of his first wife: “’Let me show you my favorite picture of her,’ he says, holding up a snapshot of Neilia in a bikini. ‘She had the best body of any woman I ever saw. She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn’t she?’” His staff was already using his family tragedy as a shield: “Biden’s staff still protects him. The few reporters admitted in the past eighteen months have been asked to concentrate on Joe Biden, Senator, rather than Joe Biden, tragic figure.” He was already doing this, too: “Biden tells . . . a joke with an antisemitic punchline and asks that it be off the record.”

He was already getting fawned over…

[I have said this repeatedly — Joe Biden has not changed at all, except in cognition. He has always been twenty pounds of bull**** in a ten-pound bag, and always a vicious demagogue. All of his character flaws came to the surface in the 1987 campaign: cheap shots, fabulism, plagiarism, and a phony tough-guy attitude. The only difference was that the media stopped reporting on those, and instead crafted a “compassion” narrative that itself was twenty pounds of bull**** in a five-pound bag. — Ed]