THE LOW POST: Eat Me, Joe Biden

Now, the logic of this amendment seemed unassailable. Soldiers sent to war often end up in financial trouble, and reservists sent to war for long deployments have it even worse, often seeing their small businesses fail or bills pile up while they trade in their normal salaries for meager Army wages. It seems like a small concession to make to soldiers to offer some relief on these fronts, in exchange for asking them to risk their necks for some pointless military adventure dreamed up by a bunch of half-wit Ivy League trust-fund babies who'll never go broke and whose kids will never serve.

So Durbin's amendment made sense, but of course it died, 62-38. Most of the Republicans voted against it, but they weren't alone. Some Democrats voted nay, too, including that great old friend of the credit industry, Joe Biden.

In the election cycle immediately preceding the historic Bankruptcy Bill, Joe Biden collected some $62,125 from the credit industry, putting him in 12th place among all American politicians. To date, for his career, he's taken over a quarter of a million dollars from credit card companies, many of which are headquartered in Delaware. So it was no surprise that Biden was one of the chief pimps for this notorious law.

But what was most disgusting was the blatant hypocrisy of the bill's shepherds. One of the features of the Durbin amendment was that it would have allowed servicemen to apply for bankruptcy in any state where he or she had been stationed ? allowing him or her to choose among the states with the most advantageous bankruptcy laws. This amendment, again, was rejected by Biden and Co. But when Sen. John Cornyn of Texas decided to offer an amendment banning a similar "judge-shopping" loophole in bankruptcy law that had traditionally been used by corporations like Enron (which filed for bankruptcy in New York, where it had fifty-seven employees, rather than Houston, where it had 7,500, because the New York laws were more permissive), Cornyn was blocked? Why? A Cornyn spokesman told David Broder at the time that the Delaware senators threatened to withdraw their support for the bill if his amendment was in it.

Moreover, when an amendment was offered to close "asset protection trusts" -- a kind of trust that shields millionaires' assets from recovery in bankruptcy proceedings -- that amendment, too, was rejected. Delaware is one of five states that offer such trusts. The only people who got screwed in the bill were people with real excuses for debt problems: the military, people with serious medical issues, people who had been the victim of identity theft, all of whom had amendments to protect them shot down by the likes of Biden.

So I have to laugh when I hear Biden talking about how Donald Rumsfeld is an "impediment to this effort." What effort? Screwing the military?

Biden is a typical Democrat; he'll sell himself as prowar and antiwar, depending on the circumstances, but in reality he's neither. He's just another whore crouched over the front seat of Capitol Hill. When will we stop taking clowns like this seriously? What will it take?

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