Is there anything Joe Biden can't do?

Joe Biden told an audience in Ottumwa, Iowa Tuesday that his White House would "cure" cancer should he beat President Trump in 2020.

"I've worked so hard in my career, that I promise you, if I'm elected president you're gonna see single most important thing that changes America, we're gonna cure cancer," Biden said to applause.

First he's teaching Detroit's illiterate single moms the easy-peasy art of computer coding, now he's promising to conquer cancer. Good thing we have Old Joe, otherwise cancer might never be cured.

Apparently, there's nothing that can't be done if voters put Joe Biden on the job. Why didn't we think of it earlier?

And speaking of jobs, Joe Biden actually has been put on the job of curing cancer, as President Obama's cancer 'moonshot' guru, as well as in leading a foundation in a private capacity. According to the Washington Examiner:

During his stint as vice president, Biden oversaw the "Cancer Moonshot" initiative of the Obama administration. During his final State of the Union address, Obama announced the program that resulted in a report outlining recommendations for funding and areas to focus research.

After his term, Biden oversaw the Biden Cancer Initiative dedicated to cancer prevention and research until he stepped down from the organization immediately after he announced his run for president. 

How'd that work out? Somehow, the cancer's still around. The only thing I think we could bet on is that his foundation - and the size of the federal cancer bureaucracy - did get bigger with Joe in the saddle. Kind of like cancer tumors.

What's stupid about this whole claim is that presumably, Joe Biden, having been affected by cancer based on the death of his son Beau, would know very well that cancer can't be cured by government or anything like it.

Presumably, he'd know that Fact One in cancer research is that no one knows what causes cancer, a disease of cell mutation, which is why a full cure for every kind of cancer is so elusive. No one knows why some people get it and others don't. There are some indicators which seem to contribute - such as smoking. But even those don't explain why someone such as writer Cathy Seipp could die of lung cancer without smoking a single cigarette in her life.

Presumably, Biden would also know that significant progress has been made as things are now, and there's no conservative conspiracy to halt cancer treatment or cures; conservatives are some of cancer research's top supporters. In fact, many kinds of cancer are being cured, not by government, but by talented medical practitioners on the frontiers of knowledge. No insertion of Biden into the matter is going to make a difference on that. We already know what inserting Biden does to the cancer-cure situation based on his past roles - which is zero.

Yes, curing cancer takes resources. But mainly, it takes medical brains. It takes volunteers with precisely the right profile for experiments. It takes a certain amount of luck. And none of that is anything Joe Biden can affect whatever his grand claims. Merely throwing government money at the problem has been done many times before, so here we are. 

We do see a pattern with Biden in this grandiose claim, quite comparable to his claim to have taught single moms to code, almost as if his godfather is Al Gore, who claimed to have invented the Internet. It's the ego, the willingness to make false promises, the effort to make any claim to get a vote, in a remarkably cynical gambit, given that he can't deliver on this promise and he knows it.

But it's also something else. As other Democratic candidates fall over themselves to espouse socialism with utterly Utopian programs such as the Green New Deal, Old Joe must be feeling left out. He knows that socialism doesn't sell with the voters, and when Republicans start bringing up Venezuela, it's going to be curtains for them. With Biden not about to fall into that trap and prizing his status as a moderate, (socialist as he may be at heart) he's moving on to other fantastical ideas, such as promising to cure cancer.

It's the same pie-in-the-sky thing the socialist me-too-ers are offering, without the apparent class warfare, expropriatory taxation, massive expansion of government power, or destruction of jobs that scares voters. Since Biden knows enough not to offer a socialist Utopia, he's offering wilder stuff such as his promise to cure cancer, demonstrating that only his ego is the limit.