Former Vice President Joe Biden is touting the endorsement of Cindy McCain, the widow of the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). Biden claimed Monday — falsely — that President Donald Trump had disparaged soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.”
Biden actually said far worse about McCain while he was still alive, and the two were on opposing sides in the 2008 election.
After the McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, pointed out then-Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) ties to unrepentant former domestic terrorist William Ayers, then-Sen. Biden (D-DE) attacked McCain as a coward who would not dare say that to Obama directly.
“In my neighborhood where I came from if you got something to say to a man, look him in the eye and say it,” Biden said.
In addition, Biden belittled McCain: “You can’t call yourself a maverick when all you’ve ever been is a sidekick,” he said in a speech in Florida. Biden also called the Vietnam War hero “an angry man, lurching from one position to another.”
Obama also frequently attacked McCain’s “temperament,” while other Democrats questioned his age (72 at the time, five years younger than Biden is today).
The hard feelings appeared to be mutual. Though Biden and McCain had once worked together in the Senate, the campaign drove a wedge in between them for years. In 2009, McCain and the late Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) ripped Biden for his mismanagement of the economic recovery, saying Biden was responsible for the waste in the $862 trillion stimulus.
But McCain’s feud with Trump evidently led his family to bury the hatchet.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.