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 .
He
then hops on Air Force Two to fly back to his home in Delaware . At
the end of the weekend, he returns on Air Force Two, usually a Boeing C-32.
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
toWashington — 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
theWilmington 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.
It’s
really insane how they get away with all of this w/o any accountability.
They
should all be impeached, but it will never happen!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.