Biden Means Business As Usual

[Herb Schaffler]

August 25, 2008 Biden Means Business As Usual

What 'new politics'?

by Justin RaimondoTo anyone who really believed Barack Obama's candidacy represented "hope" and "change," the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. of [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. as his running mate should put that illusion to rest. Antiwar activists point to Biden's [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. of authorizing Bush to go to war with Iraq, but even worse was his behavior in the run-up to the invasion.
Today he wails that [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , that [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. knew the truth about Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction," but it [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. be said that Biden was all that eager to discover the truth, either. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee in 2002, Biden was in a position to ensure that a real debate took place on the issue. Yet, in the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. held by his committee, [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. antiwar "expert" was called: all were spear-carriers for the War Party.
Biden was chosen for the number-two spot because he is [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. to strengthen the Obama campaign in the area of foreign policy, where the candidate is considered weakest. Biden is presented as a man of experience, and a foreign policy maven to boot. However, it is precisely in the realm of foreign policy that Biden falls far short. Biden supported the president's war policies, at least in terms of ends if not means, and he made that [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. in a speech in the summer of 2005:
"Remember the $18.4 billion that Congress appropriated at the urgent request of the president of the United States in the fall of '03 for which I helped floor-manage and took on the responsibility along with others to push hard because I believe there is a nexus between the reconstruction and the physical safety and possible success of our military in the region. Just $6 billion of that $18.4 billion has been spent."
We aren't spending enough money on Iraq, said Biden, and, by the way, we need [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , not less. [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. and [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. again we heard from Biden – a favorite on the Sunday talk shows – that the president wasn't "leveling with the American people" and being honest about what it would take to "win" in Iraq. Unlike Bush, Biden had – and has – a very [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. of what "victory" in Iraq would have to mean: "Success, as I define it, is leaving Iraq better than we found it."
Is it really possible for us to leave Iraq better than we found it after killing [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. of Iraqis – and discovering that the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. for the war was based on [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. ?
As Americans began to grumble about the war, and [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. Democrats started talking about an immediate withdrawal, Biden [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. the breach as the voice of maturity and responsibility:
"Many Americans have already concluded that we cannot salvage Iraq. We should bring all our forces home as soon as possible. They include some of the most respected voices on military matters in this country, like Congressman Jack Murtha. They're mindful of the terrible consequences from withdrawing. But even worse, in their judgment, would be to leave Americans to fight – and to die – in Iraq with no strategy for success. I share their frustration. But I'm not there yet. I still believe we can preserve our fundamental security interests in Iraq as we begin to redeploy our forces."
The Democrats, claimed Biden, could carry out the policies of the War Party more responsibly, more efficiently, and with more dramatic flair:
"As David Brooks reminded us in the New York Times yesterday, 'Franklin Roosevelt asked Americans to spread out maps before them and he described, step by step, what was going on in World War II, where the U.S. was winning and where it was losing. Why can't today's president do that? Why can't he show that he is aware that his biggest problem is not in Iraq, it's on the home front'?"
Why can't President Bush be more like [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. – you know, the president who lied us into war, as [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. famously remarked, yet did it with [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. ? He also put antiwar protesters on trial for "[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. " while rounding up "[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. " (mostly American citizens of Japanese descent), seizing their property, and putting them in concentration camps. Is this really a tradition Biden would like to see revived?
Biden has been one of the War Party's most reliable servants, endorsing as "[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. " then-President Clinton's [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. on hapless Yugoslavia – like Iraq, another example of a war in which the "enemy" represented no danger to the U.S. and whose crimes were [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. . This earned him the approbation of John McCain, who, on April 11, 1999, [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. to Tim Russert on Meet the Press: "We need Joe Biden for secretary of state." An astounded Russert asked: "Is that an offer by President McCain?" McCain replied: "Absolutely!"
McCain wasn't joking, and his comments underscore the essential [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. of Washington's bipartisan foreign policy consensus, which is firmly [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. in an interventionist outlook, a militarist mindset that [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. unlimited American power and a position of unchallenged preeminence. Yet reality – [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. – is setting in, and even the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. advocates of America's role as the world's policeman are losing their pretensions. Not, however, Sen. Biden, whose most recent [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. to the Iraq war debate was a proposal to divide Iraq into three separate quasi-independent nations, one for each of the three main ethnic-religious factions. The problem is, he didn't bother consulting with the Iraqis before floating this idea, and the Iraqis were [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. .
Obama's claim that he's the harbinger of a new politics is, unfortunately, belied by his choice of a running mate. A truly new politics, one that goes beyond the red-state/blue-state dichotomy that polarizes our politics between two false choices, would have at least seriously considered Sen. [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , Republican of Nebraska, who has [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. Obama and [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. to be in the running at some point. Now that would've been truly outside the box – but far too much to expect from the ossified [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. who seem to have commandeered the Obama campaign, if not the candidate himself. Hagel, for all of his faults, was and is vehemently [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. the Iraq war, and, what's more, had the balls to stand up to the warmongers in his own party. A former Army infantry squad leader with a gruff persona and a personal history that rivals McCain's in its all-American machismo, Hagel as VP would've sent seismic shudders through the GOP's base, already visibly cracking.
The "new politics," it turns out, is pretty much the same as the old politics, of which Biden – a Washington insider for the past 35 years – is the exemplar. The War Party is jazzed at this sign that Obama isn't going to give them much trouble, especially when it comes to their latest project: [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. . Just before winning the vice-presidential sweepstakes, Biden took a trip to Georgia and returned bloviating at top speed, sounding for all the world like John McCain. As the Washington Post [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. :
"Some Democrats have been pleading with Obama to use McCain's tough response to the Russian invasion of Georgia to paint him as a trigger-happy interventionist who would risk bringing a war-weary nation into military conflict in regions where the United States has no interest.
"For those Democrats, Biden's conclusions from his trip may be a disappointment.
"Consultations with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze, Georgian Parliamentary Speaker David Bakradze, and U.S. Ambassador to Georgia John Tefft left the Democratic senator seemingly as angry as McCain is.
"'I left the country convinced that Russia's invasion of Georgia may be the one of the most significant event to occur in Europe since the end of communism. The claims of Georgian atrocities that provided the pretext for Russia's invasion are rapidly being disproved by international observers, and the continuing presence of Russian forces in the country has severe implications for the broader region. The war that began in Georgia is no longer about that country alone. It has become a question of whether and how the West will stand up for the rights of free people throughout the region.'"
Georgian atrocities? Oh, [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. ! A Georgian invasion? It never happened – just ask those "international observers." It's time to get on Russia's case. It's time to start saber-rattling and spreading the conflict throughout the region. That's what Biden, who poses as a foreign policy expert, wants U.S. policy to be, and what it will be if and when Obama gets in the White House. No, he's not Cheney, but that doesn't mean he won't be Cheney-esque.

[Herb Schaffler]

posted by [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. on 08/23/2008 @ 11:46am



Barack Obama may be doing the one thing that might have seemed impossible: he's picking a running mate whose ideas about Iraq are even worse than, and stupider than, John McCain's.
Obama, whose mushy Iraq plan excites no one, is marrying his own's flawed ideas -- which mostly revolve around beefing up US forces in Afghanistan and unilaterally attacking Pakistan -- with Biden's discredited notion of partitioning Iraq into three squabbling mini-states.
Indeed, last year it was the passage by the US Senate of a resolution in favor of Biden's dangerously misguided ideas that sparked an outburst of Iraqi nationalism. More than the Blackwater killings, more than US efforts to forcibly privatize Iraq's oil, it was the Biden idea of splitting Iraq into three pieces that galvanized Iraqi Arab nationalists. (It does, of course, excite the Kurds no end.)
Perversely, by selecting Biden, Obama might in fact hasten the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, if only because Iraqis won't be able to stomach Vice President Biden pompously lecturing them on why Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds can't live together.
As the always astute Reidar Visser [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , Biden has quietly suppressed talk of his partition plan even on his own web site, in cleaning up his act in preparation for being named Obama's running mate. Noting that Obama himself seems unable to think of Iraq in other than the Sunni-vs.-Shiite paradigm, Visser points out:

Arguably, the addition of Joe Biden to the Obama ticket might aggravate these tendencies, because in the past Biden has been a leading American voice in promoting an interpretation of Iraq as a country of three mutually hostile and internally stable population blocks. His various "plans for Iraq", while frequently misunderstood, in different ways reinforce the view that the main problem in Iraq has to do with a centralised state structure and coexistence issues. Like many others in American politics, Biden has failed to acknowledge the emerging non-sectarian trends in Iraq, seeking instead to push ideas about "Sunni federalism" during his visit to the Anbar governorate.

Need we point out that, in addition, Biden joined McCain in voting for the war resolution in 2002 that propelled the United States into Iraq? How, exactly, does Obama enhance his anti-war stand by selecting a pro-war hawk as his running mate? Among other things, Obama makes it impossible for himself to criticize McCain's pre-2003 Iraq bloodlust by selecting a bloodthirsty Democrat as his running mate.

[Herb Schaffler]

Joe Biden, Delaware Destroyer

The three best and the three worst things about Obama's VP pick

[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. | August 23, 2008


We few, we proud, we Delawareans have a particular view of Sen. Joe Biden, the six-term Democrat announced as Barack Obama's vice-presidential running mate. If you take the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. Express to D.C. often enough, you'll see him in the back of one of the nice cars, resting his eyes behind Pablo Escobar sunglasses or [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. who recognizes him. When you head to the polls, there's a two-in-five chance you'll vote instead for whatever scrub the GOP put on the ballot. It's always been a bit strange to have this guy—half-suburban dad, half-jetsetter with a Death Star ego—as [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. to the nation.

The first three immediate minuses that Biden brings to the Obama-Biden ticket:

1. Drug warrior, at arms! In 1982, when John McCain was making his first run for political office, Joe Biden was building his credentials for a national bid. That [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. he proposed the office of "drug czar." Thus began a pattern: Whenever people were panicking about drug abuse, Biden would swoop in to assure them that their panic was justified. The [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. that could be used as drug paraphernalia? The RAVE Act? Biden was there with a pen. Since 2002, he has softened only a little on the drug war, [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. about the crack/cocaine sentencing disparity two decades too late.
2. PATRIOT Actor. Don't use drugs? Never fear: Biden knows how to restrict your liberties, too. As The New Republic's Michael Crowley [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. a month after the 9/11 attacks:

In the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Biden did, in fact, champion an anti-terrorism bill similar to the one now before Congress (though it was, as he complains, badly watered down by anti-government conservatives and leftist civil libertarians). And Biden doesn't let you forget it. "I introduced the terrorism bill in '94 that had a lot of these things in it," he bragged to NBC's Tim Russert on September 30. When I spent the day with him later that week, Biden mentioned the legislation to me, and to several other reporters he encountered, no fewer than seven times. "When I was chairman in '94 I introduced a major antiterrorism bill--back then," he says in the morning, flashing a knowing grin and pausing for effect. (Never mind that he's gotten the year wrong.) Back in his office later that afternoon, he brings it up yet again. "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill."

And [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. for the U.S. Public Service Academy!

3. The Red, White, and Blue Man's burden. Biden isn't [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. in the way that John McCain is a hawk. He doesn't look to military intervention as the first solution to every foreign policy trip-up. But he still wants the United States to solve them all. Darfur? [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. The embargo on Cuba? [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. NATO expansion and aid to Georgia? Check. Biden amplifies Obama's long-held, and well-disguised, neo-liberal foreign policy. If you were leaning toward the Democrats because you're tired of leaders bellowing and demanding action from the actors in every foreign flare-up, forget it. That's going to be Biden's job description.

Politically, though, none of this is likely to wound Obama. [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. to Biden, highlighting his criticism of Obama's experience (compare it to, say, Hillary Clinton saying she had experience while "Obama gave a speech"), is yawn-worthy stuff designed to slice into the news cycle. It won't stick.
Meanwhile, Biden helps Obama out in a few important ways.

1. Anti-Rudyism. There is an upside to Biden's aggressive foreign-policy realism: He's a brutal, effective critic of even stupider foreign policy. As Politico's Ben Smith [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. Biden was the most confident and aggressive opponent of the "war on terror" concept. "Terror is a tactic," he has said. "Terror is not a philosophy." That's not just promising from a policy perspective. It presents the Democrats with an opportunity to reframe the debate over terrorism.

2. Liberalism with a tough-guy face. Biden is exactly the kind of Democrat who would be winning easily this year if the party's voters hadn't gotten so distracted by that hopeful guy, that creepy lawyer guy, and that angry ex-president's wife. He is a doctrinaire liberal who has remained, nevertheless, completely relatable and C-movie tough. Apart from the 2005 Bankruptcy Bill (which sucked wind for reasons that should bother partisans of any side), there's nothing in his economic record, or interest-group voting record that should give liberals a second's pause. He helped [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. of Robert Bork, thereby saving Roe v. Wade for two decades. Between that and his authorship of the Violence Against Women Act, he'll lock up those Hillary voters who aren't just interested in throwing fits.

3. Don't call it a comeback. It shouldn't matter, but the manner in which Biden has survived gaffes, mockery, and a straight-up plagiarism scandal is pleasing, in a Hollywood kind of way. Biden recovered from his [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. by burying all presidential ambitions for a generation and burrowing into his Senate work. He wasn't a foreign policy expert, so he became one. When he says something stupid, he bounces back. I never got why his comments about Indian-Americans staffing 7-Elevens and Dunkin' Donuts in Delaware were offensive, but in any case now Obama gets to look like an above-it-all pol who doesn't care about political correctness.

[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. is an associate editor of reason.