Vice President Joe Biden's humble life
Take the time to read this, you will not believe it!
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 .
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.
Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. He is the New York Times best selling author of books on the Secret Service, FBI and CIA.
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