Liveblogging: Joe Biden Is Thugged Out

DENVER — In 2004, I was googling around to find something about Joe Biden for a piece I was writing. What I found was a short-lived blog titled Joe Biden Is Thugged Out, devoted to celebrating the Delaware Senator’s bodacious pugilism. Sadly, the blog shut down after a couple posts. But now, as Joe Biden comes to deliver his nomination speech as vice president, heed the words of Rick Ross: Now it’s back to the thugging.

8:31 — “I’m a helluva success,” he declares himself, because his son, Attorney General Beau Biden of Delaware, turned out so well. “Beauy, I love ya.” Both salty and emotive.

8:34 — “No longer will you hear the most dreaded eight words in the English language: ‘The Vice President’s office is on the phone.’” Stumbled over the line, but you know, still funny.

8:36 — “When I got knocked down by kids bigger than me,” he says, talking about his adorable mom, “she told me — and this is the God’s honest truth — ‘Bloody their nose.’” The whole family is thugged out!

8:37 — “I’ve never seen a time when Washington has watched so many people knocked down without helping them get back up.” Great line. “That’s the America we’re gonna get if George — if John McCain is elected.” Pause. “Freudian slip!” What a great moment for a slip-up.

8:40 — Telling Obama’s story, interpreting his time on the South Side serving the underprivileged as a preview of his presidency. “Because Barack Obama made that choice, families in Illinois have moved for welfare to the dignity of work.” And he’s impressed by “how fast he hit the ground running” in the Senate, rebutting the charge that Obama’s underexperienced.

8:43 — Here it comes. “John McCain is my friend… a friendship that goes beyond politics.” But! “I profoundly — I profoundly — disagree with the direction he wants to take this country, from Afghanistan to Iraq.” He’s yelling. Voting with Bush? Tax breaks to the wealthiest companies? “That’s more of the same.” Oil companies. That sound is the sound of Biden’s gun cocking. A “that’s not change, that’s more of the same” chant goes out.” Kinda predictable.

8:45 — “These times require more than a good soldier. They require a wise leader.” More cops on the street. Education. Obama will “never ever ever give up until we achieve equal pay for women.”

8:48 — Laying into the Bush foreign policy, from multipolarity to climate change to “the reemergence of fundamentalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the real central front of the war on terrorism.” Obama-Biden “will help the people of Georgia rebuild.” From Iraq to Afghanistan to everywhere, Bush has been “an abysmal failure” and McCain is “complicit in it.” Yelling again: al-Qaeda has “regrouped in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan…. John McCain was wrong and Barack Obama was right.”

8:50 — So here it goes. “Again and again and again, John McCain has been wrong and Barack Obama has been right.” From Iran talks to timetables for withdrawing from Iraq, Biden is drawing a boundary between John McCain and the national security consensus that Obama has long advocated. “On the great foreign policy questions” John McCain has been “proven wrong.”

8:52 — “We get back up! We get back up together!” Please don’t play Chumbawumba. “God bless America and may God protect our troops!” He does this righteous anger on behalf of working America really well. And — thank God — they’re playing Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” on the way out.