Take the
time to read this, you will not believe it!
Joe
Biden's humble life
By Ronald Kessler
Every Friday the vice president takes a helicopter designated as
Marine Two from the vice president’s residence in northwest Washington to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland .
He then hops on Air Force Two to fly back to his home in Delaware . At the end of the weekend, he returns
on Air Force Two, usually a Boeing C-32.
On Saturdays in warm weather, Biden regularly returns to Andrews
on the airplane to play golf at the base with President Obama. After the game,
he flies back to Delaware . On Sunday evening, he returns on the plane to Washington — all at taxpayer expense.
The Boeing C-32 is a specially configured Boeing 757-200
commercial jet. The cost of flying the plane is $22,000 an hour, so each
half-hour trip to or from Delaware costs about $10,000. Each golf game
costs taxpayers $20,000. At that rate, the annual cost to taxpayers of Biden’s
weekend trips is well over $1 million. That does not include so-called deadhead
flights when the plane often flies back to Washington empty and then returns empty to pick up
Biden.
In addition, the Secret Service rents more than 20 condominiums in
the Wilmington area for agents who must accompany Biden
when he returns to his home state. Rather than try to find hotel space, the
Secret Service decided to rent the condos in part because, even when he knows
his schedule in advance, Biden rarely tells agents until the last minute when
he will be returning to Wilmington beyond his weekend trips. As a result,
agents cannot plan their own lives.
A Secret Service agent says that since Air Force Two parks at
Andrews, Obama is obviously aware that Biden is running up a huge government
tab for each game of golf they play.
Biden’s press office had no comment. Asked if President Obama
thinks these costs are appropriate and why he has not questioned Biden’s flying
to play golf with him at a cost of $20,000 per game, the president’s press
office had no comment.
Biden’s commutes have cost taxpayers at least $4 million so far.
After my story ran on Newsmax, a major media outlet obtained Pentagon records
confirming the trips and costs. But so far, that outlet has not run the story.
The rest of the media have ignored it.
In addition to his salary as vice president of $230,700, Biden has
free use of the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory. The vice
president’s residence is a handsome 9,150-square-foot, three-story mansion
overlooking Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington .
Complete with pool, pool house, and indoor gym, the white brick
house was built in 1893 as the home of the superintendent of the U.S. Naval
Observatory. Congress turned it into the official residence of the vice
president in 1974 and gave it the address One Observatory Circle .
During the day, at least five Navy stewards attend to every
personal need of the second family, including cleaning, cooking, shopping for
food, and doing the laundry.
Biden has portrayed himself as a regular Joe, a product of a
working-class family who takes on millionaires and Republicans who are said to
be out of touch with middle-class Americans.
Last June, Obama appointed Biden to root out wasteful government
spending. But behind the scenes, it’s a different matter.
Biden’s disregard for the cost of constantly shuttling back and
forth to his home in Wilmington and his additional trips to golf with the
president betray the arrogant, contemptuous attitude we saw him display toward
Ryan during the debate.
“The White House is a character crucible,” Bertram S. Brown, M.D.,
a psychiatrist who formerly headed the National Institute of Mental Health,
told me for the Secret Service book. “It either creates or distorts character.
Few decent people want to subject themselves to the kind of grueling abuse
candidates take when they run in the first place,” says Dr. Brown.
“Even if an individual is balanced, once someone becomes
president, how does one solve the conundrum of staying real and somewhat humble
when one is surrounded by the most powerful office in the land, and from
becoming overwhelmed by an, at times, pathological environment that treats you
every day as an emperor?”;
The vice president has chosen the emperor approach, revealing his
true character.
He is the New York Times best
selling author of books on the Secret Service, FBI and CIA.
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