Friday Filosophy v.03.18.22
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. born November 20, 1942) is an American politician who is the 46th and current president of the United States. Biden was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, moving with his family to New Castle County, Delaware, in 1953 when he was ten. He studied at the University of Delaware before earning his law degree from Syracuse University in 1968. He was elected to the New Castle County Council in 1970 and became the sixth-youngest senator in U.S. history after he was elected to the United States Senate from Delaware in 1972, at age 29. Biden was the chair or ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 12 years. He also chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1987 to 1995, dealing with drug policy, crime prevention, and civil liberties issues; led the effort to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Violence Against Women Act; and oversaw six U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings, including the contentious hearings for Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008. Biden was reelected to the Senate six times and was the fourth-most senior sitting senator at the time when he became Obama’s vice president. During eight years as vice president, Biden leaned on his Senate experience and frequently represented the administration in negotiations with congressional Republicans. On foreign policy, Biden was a close counselor to the president and took a leading role in designing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011. In 2017, Obama awarded Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction.
Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris defeated incumbent president Donald Trump and vice president Mike Pence in the 2020 presidential election. He is the oldest president and the first to have a female vice president. His early presidential activity centered around proposing, lobbying for, and signing into law the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to help the United States recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing recession, as well as a series of executive orders.
- Folks, I can tell you I’ve known eight presidents, three of them intimately.
- Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.
- The greatest gift is the ability to forget – to forget the bad things and focus on the good.
- In the good old days when I was a senator, I was my own man.
- For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community.
- When my first semester grades came out, my mom and dad told me I wouldn’t be playing football.
- My dad used to have an expression – ‘It is the lucky person who gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they are about to do, and thinks it still matters.’
- Reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.
- Foreign policy is like human relations, only people know less about each other.
- In my heart, I’m confident I could make a good president.
- Don’t hold against me that I don’t own – that I don’t own a single stock or bond. Don’t hold it – I have no savings accounts.
- Well, I thought the deal was, when you went to work for the government you weren’t supposed to make money!
- I’ve been really, really fortunate.
- Most liberals think of civil liberties as their Achilles heel. It isn’t.
- In this world, emotion has become suspect – the accepted style is smooth, antiseptic and passionless.
- I know what I believe, I know what I want to do, and I’m just comfortable saying it, and laying it out there.
- I consider myself to be as informed on American foreign policy as anyone in America.
- You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, ‘Joey, the guy in Olyphant’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression.’
- The American public’s a lot more sophisticated than we all give them credit for. And on complicated issues, I’m going to give them straight answers. And if it takes more than three minutes, I’m going to do it.
The Time is Now.