Biden's Senate Farewell

I watched most of this last night on C-SPAN. It was actually really cool, albeit long. He made a big deal about how his time in the U.S. Senate caused him to befriend people whose (ostensibly bad) ideas were among the chief reasons he ran for the Senate to begin with. He really lavished some heavy "praise" on Strom Thurmond's political-racial metamorphosis over his ~50-year Senate career. Which may not have seemed odd, except there were two black women seated behind Biden whose reactions I was forced to scrutinize, thus causing me to divert attention away from the great tales of Biden and Daniel Inouye, who Biden mentioned no less than 281 times (seemingly because he was the only Senator from his era who bothered to come; Leahy is just a terrible person, Kennedy is a walking corpse, and Byrd hasn't actually attended a Senate meeting for 3 years).

I did like this one little factoid, which Biden explained by removing his Senate desk drawer and lifting it for the audience to see. Apparently every Senator to ever serve etches his or her name into their desk drawer. So if you remove the papers from a random desk on the Senate floor, it looks not too dissimilar from a random booth at Gino's in Chicago. Except it's Barry Goldwater and Pat Moynihan instead of Tony C. and Johnny Ray.