Tough Talk

What happened to the high road?
At an anti-sexual assault rally at the University of Miami earlier this week, Joe Biden said that if he were in high school and heard Trump making lewd comments about women, he would “take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” This is also the same gentleman who once suggested, "if you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door." This was back in 2013, while Joe was still the sitting Vice President of the United States. Back in those days, he could be counted on to say the darndest things. Three years after that, he was campaigning for Hillary Clinton when he spouted off about the Republican's nominee: “The press always ask me, ‘Don’t I wish I were debating him?’ No, I wish we were in high school — I could take him behind the gym. That’s what I wish.”
At the time, Private Citizen and candidate Trump responded, “Did you see where Biden wants to take me to the the back of the barn? Me. I’d love that. Mister Tough Guy. You know, he’s Mister Tough Guy. You know when he’s Mister Tough Guy? When he’s standing behind a microphone by himself.” After a pause, “Some things in life you could really love doing.”

The things in life that I could really love doing do not include going behind a barn or a gym to duke it out with guys in their seventies. Even if I really didn't like them. Even if I found their comments and actions despicable. Maybe that's because I'm still in my fifties and twenty years is just long enough to forget about exactly what it feels like to be in a fistfight. I haven't been in that many myself, but I don't remember coming away feeling like a "winner." Instead, I remember when all that adrenaline left and I was left hurting and wondering if I had made my point by making my hands hurt by hitting and being hit, I was pretty sure that I hadn't. Instead, I had deepened the divide by punching my way into a bigger mess. Those movie fights that go on for several minutes, crashing through doors and windows, bare fists flying and that trickle of Captain Kirk blood dripping from the corner of your mouth doesn't really exist. The only way to make a boxing match last more than two rounds is to pad the gloves and have somebody in the corner to stitch up the combatants. So how did our "President" respond to Joe's most recent assertions? “Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy,” he wrote on Twitter. “Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!” If I'm the principal here, I suspend them both for a few days just so I don't have to listen to them.