Joe Biden beat up a guy in a doughnut shop once

If there's one thing you don't do to Vice President Joe Biden, it's mess with his kid sister, Valerie — a lesson we learned yesterday with the Scranton native's retelling of the time he "smashed [the] head" of a local bully in a doughnut shop one fateful Sunday morning.

Biden appeared yesterday at a New York gala for Vital Voices, a women's rights charity that celebrated "men who combat violence against women." An honoree for the night, Biden was invited to receive the "Voices of Solidarity" award, which, of course, prompted him to make an acceptance speech.

But rather than, say, plagiarizing tales of how his mining family "would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours" from a British politician like he did back in 1988, Biden simply relayed to us the childhood tale of what only can be described as "Joey Biden and the Doughnut Shop Bully."

It begins on a Sunday morning after church long since passed, with the Biden family hankering for doughnuts. Via The Daily Beast:

"I remember coming back from Mass on Sunday," Biden began. "Always the big treat was, we'd stop at the donut shop…We'd get donuts, and my dad would wait in the car. As I was coming out, my sister [Valerie] tugged on me and said, 'That's the boy who kicked me off my bicycle.'"

"So I went home — we only lived about a quarter mile away — and I got on my bicycle and rode back, and he was in the donut shop." 

As it turns out, Biden found the boy, and found him well, with the apparent bully "leaning down on one of those slanted counters." From there, Fightin' Joe Biden began to earn his name:

Sensing his opportunity, Joey Biden pounced: "I walked up behind him and smashed his head next to the counter." 

"I'm not recommending it," he added. 

"His father grabbed me, and I looked at his son and said, 'If you ever touch my sister again, I'll come back here again and I'll kill your son.' Now, that was a euphemism. I thought I was really, really in trouble… My father never once raised his hand to any one of his children — never once — and I thought I was in trouble. He pulled me aside and said, 'Joey, you shouldn't do that, but I'm proud of you, son.'" 

The point, if there is one, that Biden was attempting to make was that his family raised him to know when to "speak up and speak out" to defend others. It's a noble enough goal, one that attempts to get across Biden's alignment with "American" values like action and justice.

But, like The Onion's satire, he appears to have only out-Bidened himself again.

[The Daily Beast]