Fact-challenged Joe Biden

If I hear the word "hard-scrabble" again in reference to Joe Biden I'm going to... well, laugh probably. Read this Steve Chapman piece, excerpts follow:

The facts are there for anyone who wants to look at them. When Joe Biden Sr. died in 2002, his obituary in the News-Journal of Wilmington reported that when he married in 1941, "he was working as a sales representative for Amoco Oil Co. in Harrisburg."

It went on, "Biden also was an executive in a Boston-based company that supplied waterproof sealant for U.S. merchant marine ships built during World War II. After the war, he co-owned an airport and crop-dusting service on Long Island." Upon moving his family to Delaware, the News-Journal said, Biden "worked in the state first as a sales manager for auto dealerships and later in real-estate condominium sales."

Executive, co-owner and manager? Those titles identify the jobholder as solidly middle class, if not better. They fall in the category of white-collar occupations, not blue-collar.

And it gets better....

Biden notes that he himself could have gone to the best public high school in Delaware. Instead, he enrolled at Archmere Academy, a Catholic prep school that made him think he had "died and gone to Yale." He took a summer job to help pay the steep tuition, which today amounts to $18,450 a year.

OK, so he wasn't rich, but hardly underprivileged in the normal use of the term. So... why so serious, Joe, about the insistence on mythical blue-collar roots?

So where did he get his working-class reputation? Partly it comes from Biden's streetwise demeanor and his preoccupation with the fact that his family wasn't as well-off as some of the people he knew -- which seems to have given him a permanent chip on his shoulder.

Oh, well that more than explains it. Sounds like Joe's ready for a green-collar job, as in green with envy. As I've quoted Mr. Morrisey in regards to that verdantly-colored fault previously, "we hate it when our friends become successful."