We've long known that Joe Biden is a man with unseemly habits. He sniffs and fondles little girls, swims naked in front of female Secret Service agents, and has a legitimate sexual assault claim hanging over him.  If the Biden hard drive documents are legitimate (and they seem to be), he used his drug-addicted son as a bagman for bribes from foreign governments and businesses and knew that his son was inappropriate with underage girls.  A recently unearthed 1974 interview with Biden shows us the genesis of all these gross and illegal activities.

Kitty Kelly interviewed Biden two years after he entered Congress — and two years after his wife, Neilia, ran a stop sign and collided with a truck, killing her and their baby daughter.  Beau and Hunter suffered serious injuries.  (Hunter had a "serious head injury," which — and I say this without sarcasm — may explain a lot about his struggles with drugs and alcohol.)  It was a tragedy and garnered the 31-year-old Biden some much deserved sympathy.

Sympathy, however, cannot obscure that Biden is an unpleasantly weird character.  There's the arrogance from a man who was a mediocre student at best:

"My wife always wanted me to be on the Supreme Court," he says. "But while I know I can be a good Senator, and I know I can be a good President, I do know that I could never be another Oliver Wendell Holmes. I know I could have easily made the White House with Neilia. And my family still expects me to be there one of these days. With them behind me anything can happen."

Biden also engages in weird sexual boasting about his dead wife, both in terms of how sexy she was and how much she sexually satisfied him:

"Neilia was my very best friend, my greatest ally, my sensuous lover. The longer we lived together the more we enjoyed everything from sex to sports. Most guys don't really know what I lost because they never knew what I had…."

[snip]

"Let me show you my favorite picture of her," he says, holding up a snapshot of Neilia in a bikini. "She had the best body of any woman I ever saw. She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn't she?"

[snip]

"At first she stayed at home with the kids while I campaigned but that didn't work out because I'd come back too tired to talk to her. I might satisfy her in bed but I didn't have much time for anything else."

Do you want to know about Joe Biden's sex life and his Playboy bunny fantasies?  I sure don't.  His sexual obsessions seem to pair well with his behavior around little girls.

Biden's compulsive boasting shows up, too.  Was Joe really a "football hero"?  He says he was, but we now know he freely borrowed other people's life experiences.  Also, while he praises his dead wife's intelligence, there's the familiar theme of his own above-average intelligence:

"She was the most intelligent human being I have ever known. She was absolutely brilliant. I'm smart but Neilia was ten times smarter."

Biden is also openly greedy.  When you read his complaints about this salary, you can practically see him thinking of ways to use his political power to augment the salary:

Unlike most other senators, Biden makes no bones about saving he is underpaid. Last September, when the Senate was debating a pay raise for itself, he said, "I don't know about the rest of you but I am worth a lot more than my salary of $42,500 [$224,379.31 in 2020] a year in this body. It seems to me that we should flat out tell the American people we are worth our salt."

No wonder Biden told Kelly he was already feeling "the temptation to sell out":

He feels the indignity is compounded by the temptation to sell out to big business or big labor for financial help, and says it's almost impossible for a candidate to remain true to his conscience in this situation. He admits that more than once he was tempted to compromise to get campaign money.

While Biden claimed then that the memory of his upright wife restrained him from corruption, that restraint apparently vanished over the years.

The whole interview is peculiar and creepy.  It also foreshadows the man Biden became after 47 years of power and corruption.

Lastly, here's something to chew on, which I think is the most unnerving statement that Biden made in the whole interview:

He defines politics as power. "And, whether you like it or not, young lady," he says, leaning over his desk to shake a finger at me, "us cruddy politicians can take away that First Amendment of yours if we want to."

That's the Democrat view of politics in a nutshell: it's about power, and Democrats in power will always trample Americans' constitutional rights given half a chance.

Image: Joe Biden in 1974.  YouTube screen grab.