Patterico's Pontifications

9/17/2014

Joe Biden: These “Shylocks” Took Advantage

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:43 am



It’s a strong indication of what a buffoon this guy is that this offensive comment will likely merit a shrug from Big Media. It’s just Joe being Joe, you see.

It’s a cliche to say “Imagine how the media would react if a Republican had said this.” That said, imagine how the media would react if a Republican had said this.

35 Responses to “Joe Biden: These “Shylocks” Took Advantage”

  1. first?

    redc1c4 (abd49e)

  2. Who’s Joe Biden, again?

    gary gulrud (46ca75)

  3. I have no problem with it. Good for Biden. I know the Shakespearean Shylock was Jewish. So what? It was no his religion that made him a bad guy, it was his greed. Maybe we can rewrite the Merchant of Venice and rename him John Smith?

    nk (dbc370)

  4. Maybe we can rewrite the Merchant of Venice and rename him John Smith?

    Nah, that’s not white-centric enough. He would have to be named Liam Mather IV or something.

    JVW (638245)

  5. I love to point out Joe Biden to people that hate Sarah Palin so much. (Not that I’m a Palin fan, but boy do they hate her)

    Dejectedhead (a094a6)

  6. I love to point out Joe Biden to people that hate Sarah Palin so much. (Not that I’m a Palin fan, but boy do they hate her)

    As the joke goes: They told me if I voted for John McCain in 2008 that we would end up with an idiot for Vice-President. I did, and they were right.

    JVW (638245)

  7. I think he was referring to payday loans (not what he was saying earlier in the sentence)

    This is something that affected military families – that, and sometimes foreclosures while they were away, which is not supposed to happen because it is in violation of some federal law.

    http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/banks-find-more-wrongful-foreclosures-among-military-members/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

    The nation’s biggest banks wrongfully foreclosed on more than 700 military members during the housing crisis and seized homes from roughly two dozen other borrowers who were current on their mortgage payments, findings that eclipse earlier estimates of the improper evictions.

    This happened to at least 700 military members. Seven hundred! That’s um, what percent?

    Democrats talk about this.

    A famous case:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/business/27foreclose.html?pagewanted=all

    The thing is, the banks just ignored little technicalities. Like people signing statements that they read.

    Biden uses such shorthand you don’t understand him if you are unfamiliar with the issue. He also I guess uses tough, blue collar “street” language.

    http://usmilitary.about.com/od/millegislation/a/paydayloans.htm

    This seems to say this was made illegal during teh Buish Administration. Payday loans that have limited terms and get rolled over for a high fee are a new thing – people aren’t used to them.

    Most people who use that actually avoid a trap, but the companies that issue these loans would go out of business if everyone did.

    A better idea would be for the government to advance money to get people out of a hole.

    If they did, in six months they might be back in the hole so that woild need more thought. Maybe money can be deducted from future retirement benefits, or a IRA account created with a negative balance.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  8. Joe Biden: America’s Favorite Carbuncle

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  9. “Payday loans that have limited terms and get rolled over for a high fee are a new thing – people aren’t used to them.”

    Sammy – Payday loans are not a new phenomenon. They have been around since at least the Great Depression. What has changed dramatically over the past 30 years is the shape of the consumer credit industry in terms of its participants, products and size as well as the desire of people to regulate it for the good of consumers.

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  10. Hey, look on the bright side: at least he didn’t say “hook-nosed kike bastards”…

    mojo (4a927a)

  11. Would some foreign leader please die so Joe will have somewhere to go?

    askeptic (efcf22)

  12. Look Biden is an idiot, but this is a nothing burger. It’s like people getting worked up over the word “niggardly.” Your lack of literacy is not my problem. Deal.

    Gazzer (b9113e)

  13. 3.I have no problem with it. Good for Biden. I know the Shakespearean Shylock was Jewish. So what? It was no his religion that made him a bad guy, it was his greed. Maybe we can rewrite the Merchant of Venice and rename him John Smith?
    nk (dbc370)

    Shylock’s religion was a key element in the plot.
    In point of fact, his religion is what made him the bad guy to the other characters, and not his greed, which they all shared.
    If you would like rewrite it you will have to do considerably more than just change his name.

    Sam (e8f1ad)

  14. Since I can’t resist piling on, Joe referred to Asia as the “orient” just hours after the Shylock gaffe. http://www.mediaite.com/online/joe-biden-refers-to-asia-as-the-orient/
    Now, all someone has to do is explain to me why “orient” is somehow racist, or derogatory, or un-PC – I never have understood that.

    Walter Cronanty (b07329)

  15. Shylock is code for predatory Jewish money lenders who charge interest rates so exorbitantly high paying them is the equivalent of handing over a pound of flesh. The term is not only a slur on the Jewish people, it has also come to identify someone who engages in exceptionally unfair business practices and who is predisposed to take extreme advantage of the unfortunate or the unwary.

    Joe Biden knew exactly what he was saying and he was playing to the worst prejudices of the Democrat party. Openly insulting Jews is an attempt to encourage Black racists to turn out for the Mid-term Elections and to motivate Muslims to make campaign contributions.

    ropelight (5b4da7)

  16. the greater question, is why do we need pay day loans, five years into recovery summer?

    narciso (ee1f88)

  17. WC…I believe it goes back to when the world was divided between the Occident, and the Orient, but beyond that, I haven’t a clue, nor a care.

    askeptic (efcf22)

  18. In high school I hd a teacher who proposed the position that THE MERCHANT OF VENICE was a subversive tragedy, with Shylock as the hero.

    Biden has spent his entire time in office making Spiro Agnew look like a statesman.

    C. S. P. Schofield (848299)

  19. Sam, what you said goes with what C.S.P. Schofield said. “Give a dog a bad name …” I would not call Shylock a hero but he was a powerful and tragic figure.

    nk (dbc370)

  20. 14: “orient” is the old term for Eastern Asia, and anything old is obviously raciiisssst,.

    Ibidem (a4af47)

  21. It’s the Latin root word (oriens/orientalis) and anyone who insists on the German-origin East is a Nazi linguo-supremacist.

    nk (dbc370)

  22. I’m still puzzled that nobody got on Biden for his remark about “They’ll put y’all back in chains.” Really? The party that was formed to end slavery wants to bring slavery back, and your only hope is voting for the party of the KKK? Why didn’t anybody bite his head of for that stupid, offensive remark? Well, we all know why …

    Tragic Christian (229525)

  23. Someone call my Better Half oriental once. They did not have a good day.

    JD (fe9d30)

  24. I cannot believe that you do not recall the Right castigating Biden for his “chains” nonsense.

    JD (fe9d30)

  25. duh biden disappeared along with sock-puppet Fridays.

    mg (31009b)

  26. Someone call my Better Half oriental once. They did not have a good day.

    FWIW, “Oriental” can refer to Asians from mainly the eastern portion of Asia, such as Korea, China or Japan, whereas “Asian” can mean people from as far west as India and Bangladesh. So while a person from India can be labeled “Asian,” he or she can’t also be described as “Oriental.” OTOH, a person from China can be both Asian and Oriental.

    In the UK, for example, many immigrants from India are labeled by the British media as “Asian,” which is a word that in the US evokes an image of people mainly from Korea or China. I’m guessing that many folks from East Asia aren’t exactly thrilled being lumped together with people from the very Third-Worldish societies to the west, including India. So they might feel that “oriental” has a bit more cachet, if you will.

    Another thing: many politically correct blacks (and others) throughout America nowadays favor the label of “African-American.” But that mouth-full-of-syllables phrase lacks the versatility of “Asian-American.” Simply put, while a US-born person from, say, Korea or Japan won’t flinch at being designated “Asian,” I imagine many US-born black people will flinch (or chortle) if the “African-American” label is shortened to simply “African” and applied to them.

    Mark (c160ec)

  27. There’s a world of difference between The Orient, oriental art, and an “oriental” (person).

    nk (dbc370)

  28. Heh! I just started re-reading an old John Campbell Gault and, smack, there’s the narrator describing interior decorating as “a swish-infested field”. Now, that is old-fashioned.

    nk (dbc370)

  29. I thought shylock meant crooked lawyer (yeah, I spotted the redundancy). Now it is offensive? Really?

    What a nation of wussies & speech police.

    Smarty (360541)

  30. You need some speech polishing. “Shyster” is lawyer. “Shylock” is moneylender.

    nk (dbc370)

  31. My father’s aunt (uncle’s widow) told me that after World War I, when the United States wanted back the money it loaned, they called it “Uncle Shylock”

    Can I find something on the Internet, when all informaton is supposedly available, in 21st Century, to support that?

    Yes.

    http://www.cairn.info/revue-histoire-politique-2013-1-page-29.htm

    When “Uncle Sam” became “Uncle Shylock”: Sources and Strength of French Anti-Americanism, 1919-1932

    http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1900153?uid=3739808&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104647345777

    Reassessing “Uncle Shylock”: The United States and the French War Debt, 1917-1929

    Benjamin D. Rhodes

    The Journal of American History
    Vol. 55, No. 4 (Mar., 1969), pp. 787-803

    But I’d probably never have learned this if I didn’t hear this from oral “tradition” before.

    Was this limited only to France? That would be a piece of new information to me, but may account for why I never heard about this anywhere else.

    Sammy Finkelman (6d2ca9)

  32. TIME Magazine claims that the term “Uncle Shylock” was used in a number of contexts until the 1950s.

    http://time.com/3394403/shylock-biden/

    But it doesn’t describe who said it, and when.

    It seems like a book was published in 1927 caled “Alias UIncle Shylock.

    And Google turned up:

    http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1817&dat=19360525&id=eug-AAAAIBAJ&sjid=Kk0MAAAAIBAJ&pg=5089,6535186

    The Tuscaloosa (alabama) News of May 25, 1936 Page 4:

    IT’S ‘UNCLE SHYLOCK’ NO MORE

    ONE of the things this country has got away from in recent years is the once-familiar designation “Uncle Shylock”

    No one ever refers to “Uncle Sam” any more as a “Tight-Wad” or “Stingy Old Things”. Those designations belong to a vanished era.

    Sammy Finkelman (6d2ca9)

  33. 18. C. S. P. Schofield (848299) — 9/17/2014 @ 1:46 pm

    In high school I hd a teacher who proposed the position that THE MERCHANT OF VENICE was a subversive tragedy, with Shylock as the hero.

    Possibly affected by Harry Golden’s essay in his 1958 book “Only in America” (his books used to be much more commonly seen)

    He said the thing about Shakespeare was he gave the Jew a ‘motive.’

    Oh. look also at this:

    http://robertwilliamsofbrooklyn.blogspot.com/2014/05/teaching-shylock-by-harry-golden-1961.html

    This is not a special book about this – it seems like it’s his essay. (included in the book)

    From the essay:

    The German Nazis understood Shakespeare very well, and they did not use Shakespeare’s Shylock in all their gigantic propaganda campaigns.

    In
    other words, it is not usable for supreme vilification.

    Sammy Finkelman (6d2ca9)

  34. In
    other words, it is not usable for supreme vilification.

    Sammy Finkelman (6d2ca9) — 9/18/2014 @ 10:20 am

    Not a particularly nasty name, but it does have an anti-Semitic undercurrent. As far as Unka Joe using it, well, let’s just say his speechwriters should have had something better from their thesaurus.

    Bill H (f9e4cd)

  35. Probably the main reason for not impeaching the president. Unless you can impeach the whole ticket.

    Bill C (8ae564)


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