This guy just doesn’t know when to shut up…
Via Weekly Standard:
When Joe Biden addressed the John F. Kennedy Forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School in Boston last Thursday night, he said that the “international order that we painstakingly built after World War II and defended over the past several decades is literally fraying at the seams right now.” Thanks to some of the remarks included in the vice president’s speech, the Obama administration’s relationships with several countries are also fraying at the seams. Biden placed calls over the weekend to the leaders of both Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to “clarify” remarks that suggested those countries’ complicity with al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Syria.
While Biden’s comments regarding Turkey and the UAE were perhaps the most damaging, the countries of the European Union (EU) cannot have been thrilled with his characterizations of them, either. The vice president took a dig at the relative economic weakness of the EU compared to China, though China did not escape Biden’s taunting either [emphasis added]:
I don’t know how long I’ve been hearing about how China — and I want China to succeed, it’s in our interest they succeed economically — about how China is eating America’s lunch. Folks, China has overwhelming problems. China not only has an energy problem, they have no water. No, no, not a joke — like California. They have no water. (Laughter.) It is a gigantic and multi-trillion-dollar problem for them. We should help them solve the problem.
Ladies and gentlemen, raise your hand if you think our main competition is going to come from the EU in the next decade. Put your hands up. (Laughter.) I’m not being facetious here now, I’m being deadly earnest. We want — it is overwhelmingly our interest that the EU grow, and that China grows, because when they don’t grow, we don’t grow as fast. But, ladies and gentlemen, relative terms, we are so well-positioned if we act rationally, if we invest in our people.