Posted on 02/10/2020 12:46:08 PM PST by Red Badger
It wasn’t the first time he’s had an odd answer to a woman’s question.
A young female voter asked Joe Biden on Sunday why voters should believe he can win.
His response was rather unusual.
“You’re arguably the candidate with the greatest advantage in this race,” Madison Moore, a college student, said to Biden at a New Hampshire campaign event. “How do you explain the performance in Iowa, and why should the voters believe that you can win the national election?”
“Iowa’s a Democratic caucus,” the former vice president responded. “You ever been to a caucus?”
When Moore said she had, he responded, “No you haven’t. You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier.”
The phrase immediately got attention, with many confused by Biden’s choice of words. As it turns out, “lying dog-faced pony soldier” is a phrase Biden has used before. He attributes it to John Wayne, though its actual provenance is somewhat unclear.
But for Moore, the problem wasn’t so much Biden’s word choice as the fact that he responded to her question by demanding whether she’d ever been to a caucus.
“Joe Biden has been performing incredibly poorly in this race,” Moore told the Washington Post. “His inability to answer a simple question from a nobody college student like me only exacerbates that reality.”
Biden has been criticized in the past for responding to questions — especially questions posed by women — in ways that seem condescending, as when he called moderator Lyz Lenz a “lovely person” after her question at a September LGBTQ rights forum. And the moment in New Hampshire was another reminder that while Biden’s responses may seem folksy or homespun to some, to others they’re a sign that he’s not always treating voters with the seriousness they deserve.
Biden has used “lying dog-faced pony soldier” before
Biden explained the provenance of “lying dog-faced pony soldier” at a North Dakota rally in 2018, saying that his brother loved to use lines from movies.
“There’s a line in a movie, a John Wayne movie, where the Indian chief turns to John Wayne and says, this is a lying dog-faced pony soldier,” Biden said.
It’s not clear if this line actually shows up in any John Wayne movie — as Matthew Dessem points out at Slate, there are 180 to sift through. The general consensus seems to be that Biden is probably thinking of the 1952 Tyrone Power film Pony Soldier, in which a character says, “The pony soldier speaks with a tongue of the snake that rattles.”
Whatever the case, Biden has used the line in the past when responding to questions. At an Iowa event in December, a young voter said that President Obama promised his father that he could keep his existing health plan after the passage of the Affordable Care Act — but, in fact, his dad wasn’t able to do so.
“Were you lying to my dad?” the voter asked.
“A lying dog-faced pony soldier. No,” Biden said, before acknowledging that some people were forced to change plans under the ACA.
When he used the phrase on Sunday, it felt like a bit of a left turn from Moore’s question. She had asked why voters should believe he could win, following his fourth-place finish in Iowa. His response was, apparently, to start explaining caucuses to her, assuming she’d never been to one.
As it happens, he was right — Moore later said in a statement to the Washington Post that she had never been to a caucus.
“I asked Joe Biden a fair question,” she wrote. “His immediate response was to question whether I had ever attended a caucus. In my nervousness in the presence of the former Vice President, I nodded yes.”
Whether she’d personally been to a caucus or not, she told the Post, was irrelevant to her question. It’s part of a pattern in his interactions with voters
The “lying dog-faced pony soldier” phrase itself was a joke, according to Biden campaign traveling national press secretary Remi Yamamoto.
But it wasn’t the first time Biden has faced scrutiny for his responses to questions.
In June, activist K.C. Cayo asked Biden about his stance on the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for most abortions (though he supported Hyde in the past, Biden now says he backs repeal of the amendment). Cayo, who uses they/them pronouns, and the two women activists with them, also asked Biden to protect sexual assault survivors. Advertisement
In response, Cayo wrote at Vice, Biden “leaned in very close to my face, and started wagging his finger at me,” saying, “Nobody has spoken about it, done more, or changed more than I have.”
“I wasn’t able to even finish my 30-second elevator pitch — I never got past the first sentence,” Cayo told Vice. “Just the fact that he wagged his finger at me in such a condescending manner is very telling.”
Then, at a forum on LGBTQ issues in September, moderator Lyz Lenz brought up Biden’s votes in favor of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act. “You did vote to repeal both of those, but you have also praised Vice President Mike Pence as a ‘decent guy,’” Lenz noted.
“You’re a lovely person,” the former vice president responded.
.......MORE SPINNING AT LINK..................
elizabeth warren’s husband would probably agree...
Vox is a left wing political rag, but they do some good non-political articles..................
Biden is a buffoon.
But...did she lie about attending a caucus?
He’s a corrupt, lecherous, bloviating old arse wipe!! He’s sickening to the max and needs to go away.....preferably to jail with his equally corrupt old boss and his no-count son!!
She admitted that she did, but that doesn’t absolve Biden..................
VOX is a bottom feeder—even in the Mariana Trench ecosystem of mass media lies.
Yes but at least Huffington Post gives one half truths. Vox out and out makes shite up.
“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”
- Variously attributed to Robert McCloskey, U.S. State Department spokesman, Alan Greenspan and Richard Nixon.
Sorry your girlfriends a liar :)
“Thing is: He called her that.”
And she had zero ability to know he was quoting from a 70-year-old Western movie, so she took it absolutely literally.
Imagine him sitting at the table in touchy international situation...THAT’s scary!
The Vox article is not “fake news”... it’s PURE BULL$HIT!
Why were they traitors? Many of the different Indian tribes hated each other.
Why would he even quote that in response to a civil question by one of his supporters?
Good movie though.
When Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their voyage of discovery, they were supposed to encourage the Indians they encountered to live at peace with other tribes. This was a foreign concept to them. Their attitude was that if they didn't fight wars, they wouldn't know who to pick as their chiefs.
Yeah so when the scouts or “pony solder” Indians were tracking them, I am sure the Apaches on the run were understanding of this history.
LOL.
Look, I was just explaining the term, since nobody else seems to know what Joe was talking about.
I am not saying all Indians were otherwise perfect.
There were some good ones and some bad ones, just like any other people.
But from the Indian standpoint, Indians who were helping ‘white-eyes’ were not held in high esteem and I think that is understandable.
What is the spinning? The article doesn’t make Biden look good.
Note that I said my wife is Apache. I think that rules out Mayan, Inca’s or Aztec client tribes helping Cortez for example.
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