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Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Biden Complains After Reporter Catches Him Off Guard With Question About Rape Reference

By Susan Duclos

Video below of Jason Mattera confronting Joe Biden on rape reference if Republicans don't support Obama's "jobs" bill.




The Hill reports:

Jason Mattera, who works for Human Events, a conservative magazine, used a pretext to catch Biden off guard in a Senate hallway and grill him on claims the vice president has made about jobs legislation.

Biden’s office has also contacted the standing committee of correspondents, which oversees the gallery, regarding whether Mattera broke the rules by ambushing him.


More:

Biden looked momentarily frozen as what he thought was a friendly gesture turned into a pointed line of tough questions from a conservative interlocutor. Biden had just signed an autograph for an admirer and still had the pen in his hand, according to a source familiar with the incident.

“I didn’t use — no, no, no,” Biden said, furrowing his brow and shaking his finger at the reporter. “What I said — let’s get it straight, guy, don’t screw around with me. Let’s get it straight.

“I said rape was up three times in Flint, [Mich.]. There are the numbers. Go look at the numbers. Murder’s up, rape is up and burglary’s up. That’s exactly what I said,” Biden added.

After initially balking at the questions, Biden stood by his argument that if Republicans continue to block the Democratic jobs bill, “murder will continue to rise, rape will continue to rise, all crimes will continue to rise.”

The Washington Post’s fact-checker ripped Biden’s claims over the weekend, giving the vice president “four Pinocchios” and writing that he “should know better than to spout off half-baked facts in service of a dubious argument.”


Here is a link to that Washington Post Fact Checker piece where they call Biden's claim about rising rape and murder rates, "absurd."

After providing the 2008, 2009 and 2010 FBI tallies on rapes and murder, The Fact Checker continues on:

More important than the raw figures is the rate per 100,000 individuals. Murder did go up—though the rate did not double from 2009 to 2010, as Biden claimed. But rape has gone down. Biden actually asserted it had tripled.


Biden got called on a lie and then got caught off guard when asked about his rape reference, was even given the chance to retract them but doubled down and now he wants to blame it all on a reporter that dared question him when he wasn't prepared.

[Update] Related- Thug Administration: White House Wants Jason Mattera Investigated for Biden Question

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