Biden vs. Trump: A schoolyard slanging match

It's not as if America hasn’t been a long-standing world leader in trash talk and bullying.

The great Muhammad Ali once said before a championship bout with Floyd Patterson, “I’ll beat him so bad he’ll need a shoehorn to put his hat on.” In more recent times, there’s no put-down more sneering than the signature “HA-ha!” of lead bully Nelson Muntz on “The Simpsons” as he points at some cringing victim.

But the first was a boxer, the second a cartoon. They were not septuagenarians serving as Democratic elder statesman and president of the United States.

Joe Biden, former vice-president, and Donald Trump got into a schoolyard slanging match this week.

Biden said in a speech that, were he still in high school, he’d take Trump “behind the gym and beat the hell out of him” for misogynistic remarks about women.

The president retorted that Biden “would go down fast and hard, crying all the way” if it came to knuckles.

Were it not too late to test the hypothesis, he would probably have added that his old man could take Biden’s old man.

Joe Biden is 75. Donald Trump is 71. Neither is apt, if blustering push came to real-life shove, to be floating like a butterfly or stinging like a bee.

This could hardly have been what the Founding Fathers had in mind for the Republic. If American exceptionalism exists, it seems in 2018 to be headed in entirely the wrong direction. Gentlemen, to your corners. (This editorial was published March 22 in the Toronto Star and distributed by The Canadian Press.)