Stephen Colbert Asks Joe Biden: 'Are You Going Nuts?'
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was questioned Wednesday on CBS’ “The Late Show” about a number of recent slips of the tongue he’s made on the campaign trail.
The line of questioning from host Stephen Colbert began in jest, with the liberal comedian confronting the former vice president on a number of embarrassing and high-profile verbal missteps, Fox News reported.
Surprisingly enough, however, Colbert did not let the self-proclaimed “gaffe machine” off the hook, asking him point blank: “Are you going nuts?”
“Mr. Vice President, you want to talk about issues, but a lot of people want to talk about your gaffes,” Colbert said. “In the last few weeks you’ve confused New Hampshire for Vermont, said [Robert] Kennedy and [Martin Luther King Jr.] were assassinated in the late ’70s, assured us, ‘I’m not going nuts.'”
“Follow-up question,” he continued. “Are you going nuts?”
Biden responded playfully at first, telling Colbert he went on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night ABC show to set the record straight on his mental state.
But the Democratic front-runner began defending himself as Colbert transitioned, asking him to address recent remarks claiming that the details are “irrelevant” in the cases voters and the media have attempted to spotlight.
This could not be better exemplified, Biden said, than in the case of a gaffe he made at a campaign stop in Hanover, New Hampshire, in August.
At the health-care-focused campaign event, he told the story of his attempt to pin a medal on a soldier in a combat zone. The only problem, PolitiFact reported, was that Biden’s story was laden with inaccuracies.
And it was not one story at all — it was an amalgamation of several different events from Biden’s past.
“Here’s the deal,” Biden said. “Any gaffe that I have made — and I’ve made gaffes, like every politician I know has — have been not about a substantive issue.”
“For example [people] made a big deal of my saying that I pinned a medal on two people. I did, but anyway. I pinned a medal on two people, and the dates,” he continued, before being cut off by Colbert.
“Well they say that the branch of the military was wrong, and the date was wrong, and the act he was awarded for was wrong, and the medal was wrong,” Colbert clarified.
“What position you held at the time was all of those were fact-checks for you and you said that details don’t matter or details aren’t important.”
Biden quickly pivoted, indicating that such slip-ups are of little importance. The details are of little concern so long as they do not interfere with a policy-related outcome, he suggested.
At least his slip-ups had not resulted in migrant children being locked up “in cages at the border,” Biden argued.
But Colbert would not let him dodge the question by projecting onto President Donald Trump.
“Some details are relevant,” Colbert interjected.
“That’s where the devil lives, is in the details.”
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