[johnforbes]

But since leaving as VP, he’s raked in $200k/speech & now rents this nearly 12k-sq-ft 5 bed/10 bath McLean mansion with a gym, sauna & parking for 20+ cars https://t.co/deNc4FGLrQ pic.twitter.com/DdkuKtv0d9


Not to be confused with Joe's 7000 square foot mansion in Delaware, or his new mansion near the ocean.


When corporations pay former/future politicians for talks, isn't it merely an open form of money laundering?

[snakeoil]

Come on John! This explains Biden's real estate "empire."

First elected to the Senate in 1973, Biden was once one of the least wealthy members of the chamber. By the time he left the White House, he and his wife, Jill Biden, reported assets between $303,000 and $1 million, as well as liabilities between $560,000 and $1.2 million. During much of his time in office, Biden’s wife was a professor at Northern Virginia Community College, where she still teaches.

Biden’s finances changed sharply when he left office. He and Jill Biden signed a multi-book deal in early 2017. Russo, Biden’s spokesman, refused to disclose how much the deal is worth. But it’s likely in the “high seven figures,” said Keith Urbahn, a literary agent who specializes in political books and has represented the likes of former FBI Director James Comey and Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse.

In June 2017, shortly after they inked the book deal, the Bidens purchased their vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Del., for $2.7 million.

Another house that Biden bought in Wilmington, Del., for $350,000 in 1996 is now worth almost $1.9 million, according to an estimate by the real estate website Zillow. The Bidens rent a third home in Virginia, near the community college where Jill Biden teaches. Russo would not say how much they pay in rent, if anything, or where it’s located.

Of all the homes, however, the new vacation home in Rehoboth Beach is special for Biden, who has told friends and associates that he wants the home as a central place for his family to gather, especially since the death of his son Beau from brain cancer in 2015.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/ ... th-1221934

[Clownkicker]

johnforbes still doesn't get that a lot of regular blue collar guys are fairly comfortable by the time they reach seventy.

It's called hard work, investment, and perseverance, johnny. (Whereas Trump was hundreds of millions in debt in the 90s but with the help of Russian money and German banks managed to weather his incompetence in business.)

Of course, johnforbes' net worth has been far above Biden's at any given age. Nevertheless, johnforbes still considers himself a 'working man'. ( I use the term loosely, obviously.)

[sillydaddy]

Sooo..why is he running for President...?
many liberals made it known they were against it....
he certainly doesn't need it …
and he is screwing up every time he opens his mouth...
Of course, the media calls them "gaffes"...but if it's Trump the media calls them "lies"..!

[johnforbes]

When did Biden do any "hard work"?

Not in PA where he grew up, and not in Delaware where he had his snout in the public trough for 45 years.

[Clownkicker]

Like most hypocritical conservatives, johnforbes is criticizing someone for NOT getting rich serving in government.

What is it with these morons? That's a GOOD thing, dimwit.

Getting rich on a book deal late in life is not the same as getting rich by funneling contracts to friends and making money through investing on secret government information.

[snakeoil]

SILLY...Maybe he just wants to continue a lifetime of service. Feel free to post your contributions to the USA.

[RealJustme]

Getting rich on a book deal late in life is not the same as getting rich by funneling contracts to friends and making money through investing on secret government information.

What an idiot. Everyone knows that huge "book deals" are just ways to launder payoffs to government workers. They even gave Michelle a 20 million dollar advance on a book she hadn't even started. Look at Hillary, not one of the books she was paid 10's of millions to write returned a fraction of what they paid her to write it. The deals are ways to pay them back for favors under the pretense of writing a book...which they don't even write.

[johnforbes]

Clowntoker will be surprised to learn that I had respect for Al Gore and Joe Biden for NOT cashing in while in Congress.

However, the point remains that Biden never did a lick of work in his lifetime, and spent almost half a century with his snout in the public trough.

He had to drop out of law school for plagiarism, and also drop out of a prior presidential campaign for plagiarism.

He likes to pretend he is a blue collar kid from Scranton, but he was VP for eight years and wouldn't know privation if he tripped over it.

[sillydaddy]

SILLY...Maybe he just wants to continue a lifetime of service.

You mean being a blathering idiot, between whiffs of women's hair..!

[Clownkicker]

Well, if Trump could do it, being a blathering idiot and cheating on wives and grabbing women's pussies, Biden figures HE could do it too, right, silly?

[johnforbes]

JFK's father bought large amounts of the books ghostwritten for JFK, and -- not knowing what to do with them -- stored them in a warehouse.

This created "bestselling" books.

Even as a senior in college, JFK's father hired a Pulitzer-winning journalist to put together JFK's senior paper and that was the only way JFK was able to become an honors grad of Harvard.

Whether you are a Dem or Repub, who could really read some vanity project book by a politician?

Obama didn't write his books, and nobody other than an opposition researcher would ever read such drivel.

[elklindo69]

Johnnie....Trump can't even read off a teleprompter or spell his own name for that matter......................

[johnforbes]

No Demosthenes, granted, but then neither was Barry O who said "um" and "ah" about 500 times every time he attempted to speak.

[sillydaddy]

I always like the photo of Barry having to use teleprompters to speak to
a classroom full of kids at an elementary school...
That photo alone defined his whole administration...!

[johnforbes]

When I hear about people wanting to perform "public service," as Snakeoil said of Biden, I always ask this question:

Did Biden want to perform such service during the Vietnam War?

When it came to serving 10,000 miles from home, in the biggest war of our lifetime, my experience is that very few people really wanted to do it.

[Clownkicker]

"When I hear about people wanting to perform "public service," as Snakeoil said of Biden, I always ask this question:
Did Biden want to perform such service during the Vietnam War?"-johnflubs

johnny, the war in Vietnam was not a "public service". It was a crime against humanity and a crime against the American people.

How you can consider sending 250,000 troops to die and be maimed for a futile cause (as McNamara explained to you Johnson did) a "public service" makes me wonder just how much Agent Orange you consumed over there.
Never mind all the Vietnamese who died for nothing. Conservatives couldn't care less about them anyway. Anyone dumb enough to live there in the first place should expect to die, right?

[sillydaddy]

"... johnny, the war in Vietnam was not a "public service". It was a crime against humanity and a crime against the American people.

Clown, then why are you liberals so outraged Trump did not participate …?

[Clownkicker]

Liberals aren't the slightest bit "outraged" that Trump didn't participate in Vietnam, dimwit.
That's just more conservative made up stupid shit.

Liberals have simply pointed out the hypocrisy of Trump pretending to have the fortitude to serve in the military when he clearly lacked any desire at all to serve. AND the hypocrisy of Republicans who have criticized and looked down their noses at many Democrats (like Clinton) for not serving due to legitimate deferments, but they give Trump a free pass for a blatantly dishonest dodging of service. (His daddy paid a doctor for it.) Everyone who has ever known Trump knows he doesn't have bone spurs. (Which tend to get worse with age, by the way. Have you ever seen Trump limp? Of course you haven't. Nobody has.)

But now Republicans are suddenly silent about the importance of military service in a President, which only shows they didn't believe the partisan bullshit they have been spewing for decades.

[johnforbes]

Clown, you were too young to be involved in that era, so don't pretend you know about it.

The basic flaw in what you said was in assuming every young soldier can predict the outcome of a war, how political generals and politicians will manage it, and how historians will judge it.

The goal in Vietnam was quite noble -- to afford the South the right of self-determination, and to prevent communism from flowing southward.

When South Vietnam was abandoned in 1975, slaughter did ensue as we all knew it would.

So blame the generals and the politicians, but not the soldiers who actually went there and tried.

Only intellectually lazy kids on the Left wouldn't understand that.

[Clownkicker]

"Clown, you were too young to be involved in that era, so don't pretend you know about it."-johnfibs

Again, why is every word out of the mouths of conservatives nothing but made up stupid shit? johnny, you have no idea what you're talking about.

"The basic flaw in what you said was in assuming every young soldier can predict the outcome of a war, how political generals and politicians will manage it, and how historians will judge it."-johnfibs

Since my thesis doesn't rely in the slightest on any of those things, they can't possibly be a "basic flaw in what I said".
The war wasn't a crime against humanity because of who won or lost or what the outcome was. Even if the U.S. had 'won' it would STILL have been a crime against humanity.

"The goal in Vietnam was quite noble..."-johnfibs

No, it wasn't. It was nothing but politics-- part of a global chess game. It was an attempt to put in place malleable and compliant rulers to serve U.S. interests. ("to prevent communism from flowing southward." was just the propaganda for public consumption.) The proof of this is that we kept putting in leaders that the Vietnamese people didn't support. They got tossed out, then we propped up someone else that we liked to be hated by the Vietnamese.

"So blame the generals and the politicians, but not the soldiers who actually went there and tried."-johnfoibles

I don't even blame the generals. They were doing their jobs that most of them likely believed in. But they don't make policy. They wouldn't have been there at all if not ordered to be there. And I certainly wouldn't ever blame the soldiers, even if they supported the war. But what Johnson did, even after he knew the War was unwinnable and pointless, is unforgivable. And McNamara should have quit his job and told the American people what was really going on. It could have saved thousands of lives and years of social upheaval here at home which is still not healed.

[johnforbes]

Look, you were too young to know the era, and all you know is what some leftist prof told you.

Nothing is more tedious than discussing Vietnam with a person who didn't serve there, but wants to pretend they know all about it.

The war was about containment of communism (Kennan), and was a noble attempt to let the South determine its own destiny -- within, obviously, the Realpolitik of the global chess game which was, always was, foreign affairs.

There used to be a t-shirt reading: "Vietnam: If You Were Not There, Shut the Fuck Up."

Good advice, and lots of people would seem brighter if they heeded it.

[Clownkicker]

Dimwit, I didn't learn anything about Vietnam from any leftist prof. And repeating that I was too young to know something doesn't make it true.

Nothing is more tedious than discussing anything with someone like you who thinks he knows something when he is completely ignorant. In other words, a typical conservative.

johnny, I don't need to take part in murder to be able to have an informed opinion about it. And just because I didn't take part in murder doesn't mean I shouldn't speak up against it. And just because you were part of a crime doesn't mean your opinion is worth any more than mine on the issue. If anything, yours is more biased.

You need to get a shirt that says "Vietnam: Just because I was there, doesn't mean I shouldn't shut the fuck up as well. I'm boring people with my self-righteous, arrogant stupidity."

[johnforbes]

You have to understand that, if you view the Vietnam War in cartoonish terms such as "murder," you just don't know enough.

It was, and is, a beautiful country.

Millions of young men, willingly or not, sought to preserve its right of national self-determination.

Sure, the leaders of the South were puppets in a global power struggle, but that is always the case.

The leftist media portrayed those who fled South Vietnam as heroic.

But the heroes were those who tried to save it, and 58 thousand American men died trying.

Men like my old pal Bill Z, on Panel 52 East.