Joe Biden is probably the unfittest candidate out there.

Confronted by a skeptical independent voter about his corrupt dealings with Ukrainian gas company Burisma, and the icky spectacle of his son with his hand out following him in his capacity as vice president wherever he went, Biden flew into a rage against the man, an 83-year-old retired Iowa farmer with the central casting name of Merle Gorman.  Not only did Biden fail to answer the man's question, but his response was to attack him, not once, but three times, for being fat.

Joe Biden EXPLODED in anger at a retired farmer who asked about his son's payouts from a Ukrainian gas company.

"You're a damn liar," Biden said before challenging him to "an IQ test."

Biden also called the man "jack" and "fat" and "too old."

Biden never answered the question. pic.twitter.com/zPTcnghfTB

— Trump War Room (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TrumpWarRoom) December 5, 2019

...I know you do (reference to farmer's saying he watched television). And by the way, that's why I'm not sedentary. I know I get up and...

...and you want to check my shape on, let's do pushups together, man, let's run, let's do whatever you want to do. Let's take an I.Q. test...

...look, fat, look, here's the deal... (Fox News noted that he appeared to catch himself and change the topic. The few kids in the room recoiled, most of Biden's audience was old).

This came off as a mighty stupid move, given that Job One for Biden is to win votes.  Do fat people votes count the same as thin people votes?  Instead of answering a tough question, he calls a guy fat?

His money's still green, and his vote counts for exactly as much as a thin person's, so Biden pretty much shot himself in the foot.  Radio host Eric Metaxas thinks so.  And for sure, voters are noticing.  A top hashtag on Twitter right now is #BidenFat

Independent voters learned from that encounter two things: that Biden can't take tough questions and that his first response to anyone who challenges him is to call him fat.  Even this New York Times opinion columnist was creeped out:

The Biden encounter is bizarre.

Guy asks a tough but legit question about his son.

It’s a valid question: why’d hunter Biden get a cozy board seat in a foreign company in an industry he has no expertise in?

And Biden’s answer is to ... challenge him to a fitness contest???

— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) December 5, 2019

My mind leaps back to the maxims of Italian Florentine statesman Francesco Guicciardini, who, in his Ricordi, written around 1530, advised:

Be careful in your conversation never needlessly to say things which, if they were reported, might displease others; because such things in times and ways you never thought of, often turn up to do you vast mischief. When occasion drives you to say what must be offensive to somebody else, at least be sure that it only offends the individual. Do not speak ill of his country, or of his family or connections; it is folly, while you only wish to strike one, to affront many.

If you have a disagreement with a person, it's the height of stupidity to attack any other quality unrelated to the disagreement, such as someone being fat.

Done in Iowa, it's unusually stupid.

Here are the stats about fat people in Iowa, according to the American Medical Association:

Seven states now have the dubious distinction of having 35 percent or more of the population battling obesity:

• Alabama
• Arkansas.
• Iowa.
• Louisiana.
• Mississippi.
• Oklahoma.
• West Virginia.

That's a stark difference from just a little more than a decade ago, when Mississippi and West Virginia were the only states above the 30 percent mark. And today's numbers are even more startling when you consider no state had an adult obesity rate higher than 15 percent in 1985 and no state was above 20 percent in 2000.

With the latest data from the NHANES showing that 39.6 percent of adults and 18.5 percent of children ages 2 to 19 in America have obesity, the State of Obesity report noted that "these are the highest rates ever documented by NHANES."

So in an identity politics–obsessed party, which includes a supposed abhorrence of "fat-shaming," Joe went out and insulted nearly 40% of the voters.  It might not be all of them that reject him for that, but you can bet some will.  Some will be offended by that, some will be offended by the ad hominem attack on the politely asked question, some will be offended by the insult to an elderly person and farmer, and some will be annoyed as heck that he tried to deflect the tough question with yelling about a push-up contest.

Joe's currently running in fourth place in Iowa according to at least one poll. His fat attack had nothing to do with the issue at hand and his flying off the handle against a voter who asked and focusing three times on his being fat pretty well insults all fat voters.

Biden's public relations team now claims Biden supposedly using the term "facts" instead of "fat," but it's bee ess. That's because the innuendo in the other two weight references directed at the farmer signal strongly that he was obsessed with the man like some bitchy schoolgirl simply for being fat. 

Look at that nasty expression (and the reactions of the bystanders directly behind him, placed there for the cameras):

The farmer, by the way, understood the illogicality of Joe's arguments. According to Fox News:

Of Biden's apparent challenge that he and Gorman do push-ups to determine their relative strength, the retired farmer remarked he had a 105-year-old friend who could do so.

"[I]t doesn't mean anything about how smart you are," he said, according to the Post.

So now we have it: Joe in fourth place in Iowa polls, the Iowa caucuses coming up soon, and Biden insults forty percent of the electorate.  Sounds like a master of political planning.  He may not be fat, but he sure as heck is unfit.

Image credit: ABC News via YouTube screen shot.