Vice President Biden is out with an alarmed e-mail cash appeal warning that the GOP will mount a “blitzkrieg” against Democrats in the fall.

Comparing GOP tactics to the fast-striking forces of Nazi Germany, Biden warns in a message sent by the DCCC today: “As things heat up, you can expect House Democrats will be hit with a GOP blitzkrieg of vicious Swift-Boat-style attack ads, Karl Rove-inspired knockout tactics, thinly veiled attempts at character assassination and tea party disruptions.”

And while the GOP is mounting a blitzkrieg, Democrats are the allies.

“Our Democratic allies in the House need your help, and the President and I hope we can count on you to come to their defense so we can hold onto our Democratic Majority and continue moving American forward in a new direction,” Biden writes in the appeal.

That was just a first draft.  Here’s the final:

“As things heat up, you can expect House Democrats will be hit with a  GOP racist blitzkrieg of vicious Swift-Boat-style, Willie Horton right-wing attacKKK ads, Karl Rove-inspired knockout tactics, thinly veiled attempts at character assassination, tea party disruptions, Halliburton, impending theocracy, back-alley abortion, he lied/people died, cherry picked, Dielbold, Carlisle Group…. pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft!”

A genuine dope.

Charles Krauthammer comments:

I think he is the man who, perhaps without intending, has given historical context to this presidency. After all, Obama sees himself as a successor to FDR and Truman, so now we have the historical procession: the New Deal, the Square Deal, and the “Big F**n Deal.”

Randall Hoven in American Thinker

“Mr. President, I’ll try to be brief.  There’s a lot to talk about.  I’d like to focus it though on the deficit, impact on the deficit, which we’re all talking about.  And I must tell you, maybe I’ve been around too long, but I am always reluctant, after being here 37 years, to tell people what the American people think.  I think it requires a little bit of humility to be able to know what the American people think.  But — and I don’t, I can’t swear I do.  I know what I think, I think I know what they think, but I’m not sure what they think.”  Vice President Joe Biden (winner of the Biden-Palin debate of 2008), Feburary 25, 2010.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, in an exclusive appearance on ABC News’ “This Week,” offered a sharp critique of the Obama administration’s handling of national security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying any achievements over the past year largely stemmed from policies implemented under President George W. Bush.

“If [the administration is] going to take credit for [Iraq's success], fair enough … but it ought to come with a healthy dose of ‘Thank you, George Bush’ up front and a recognition that some of their early recommendations with respect to prosecuting that war were just dead wrong,” Cheney told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl.

Earlier Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Cheney “either is misinformed or he is misinforming” about what policies have been most effective in combating terrorists.

Biden has also suggested that Iraq may end up being one of the Obama administration’s greatest successes.

“Obama and Biden campaigned from one end of the country to the other for two years criticizing our Iraq policy,” Cheney said. “If they had had their way, if we’d followed the policies they’d pursued from the outset or advocated from the outset, Saddam Hussein would still be in power in Baghdad today.”

On Afghanistan, Cheney said he is a “complete supporter” of President Obama’s decision to send more troops to the region and praised the selection of Gen. Stanley McChrystal to head the effort.

Meanwhile, Senator Scott Brown reacted to Biden’s snotty criticism.

Sen. Scott Brown thinks Vice President Joe Biden was “off base” when he suggested Sunday that the Massachusetts Republican get his facts straight on the legal procedures for military tribunals.

“It was insulting,” said Brown, who frequently jabbed the administration during his Senate campaign for giving suspected terrorists legal representation.

On CBS’s “Face the Nation” last weekend, Biden shot back that he doesn’t “know whether the new senator from Massachusetts understands: When you get tried in a military tribunal, you get a lawyer, too.”

“He’s trying to give me a lesson on military law, and I didn’t think it was appropriate,” Brown told POLITICO. “And I thought he was off base when it comes to explaining to the American people that somehow I need a lesson on whether people get attorneys — of course they get attorneys. There’s a difference as to what type of attorney they’re going to get and when they’re going to get that attorney, and how are they treated, and what rights do they, in fact, get.”

Brown said he is particularly incensed by Biden’s remarks because he’s served in the Massachusetts Army National Guard for more than 30 years and is currently the Guard’s top defense attorney in New England.

“I know the military rules and regulations and procedures from A to Z,” Brown said.

Mike Allen and Jim Vanderhei write in Politico about Dick Cheney’s criticism of Obama and Dem’s reaction to it.

…In an interview taped Saturday night for “Meet the Press,” Biden unloaded on his predecessor, saying Cheney is “wrong,” is “trying to rewrite history,” and “either is misinformed or he is misinforming.”

“I’m not gonna guess about his motive,” Biden told “Meet the Press” moderator David Gregory. “Dick Cheney’s a fine fellow. He’s entitled to his own opinion. He’s not entitled to rewrite history. He’s not entitled to his own facts. … What is he talking about? … I’m not being facetious: Maybe he’s not fully informed of what’s going on … I don’t know where he has been. Where was he the last four years of the last administration?”

Oh, y’know, winning the Iraq war.

Biden is so delusional, he’s been rewriting history, taking credit for the success in Iraq that he opposed. That’s not just rewriting history, it’s raping it.

The backlashes to Cheney over the past year have become every bit as vicious as his own attacks. Some nonpartisan national security analysts have called Cheney’s critiques distorted and even demagogic. Some prominent liberal commentators have called them unpatriotic, and possibly mentally unbalanced. Even a conservative Republican senator respected on foreign policy issues recently called Cheney’s criticism of Obama unfair.

Who are these unnamed critics? What gutless writing.

The former vice president’s success in driving the Obama debate has prompted a secondary debate of its own: Why does Cheney do it?

Cheney associates say he abandoned plans for a sedate post-Bush administration retirement of fly-fishing and memoir writing because he is genuinely concerned that Obama is a weak leader who is responding to political pressures in modifying war and terror policies that Cheney himself was instrumental in crafting.

Or maybe Cheney is a patriot who worries for the security of the nation he served and loves.

FYI: If generosity is the measure of a man, Joe Biden and his wife averaged charitable donations of $329 a year for the most recent decade. In 2007, the Cheneys donated 75% of their total income to charity.

This much is undisputed: President Bush pursued the winning Iraq strategy –the surge–with tepid support from Republicans and open resistance from most Democrats.

Bush saw the mission through. Bush negotiated the eventual withdrawal of troops from Iraq beginning this year. Bush.

Now, Joe Biden– who once declared that the only hope for Iraq was to be partitioned into three countries–is ready to take credit. He tells Larry King:

I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer.

You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. I spent — I’ve been there 17 times now. I go about every two months — three months. I know every one of the major players in all the segments of that society.

It’s impressed me. I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.

Me me me. Ugh.

UPDATE: A day later, instead of walking back from Biden’s boast, the WH doubles down. Gateway Pundit writes:

Shameless liars. Robert Gibbs today tried to take credit for the success in Iraq even though both Biden* and Obama voted against the successful surge that stabilized the country. That’s not all. Biden caused rioting and protests when he pushed legislation to divide Iraq into three countries. Barack Obama told supporters in 2007 that, “Preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.”

Gibbs claims, in the clip below, political pressure from Obama as a candidate, pressured President Bush. Obama was not a candidate when Bush ordered the surge.

Sarah Palin at the Gridiron Club dinner:

If the election had delivered a different result, she said Barack Obama’s balding vice-president, Joe Biden, could be in her shoes. “I could be the one overseeing the signing of bail-out cheques and vice-president Biden could be on the road selling his book Going Rogaine,” she said.

Just One Minute:

The NY Times front-pages a mini-debacle – Peter Galbraith, adviser to John Kerry and Joe Biden, has been getting rich off the advice he has been giving the Kurds:

American Adviser to Kurds Stands to Reap Oil Profits

By JAMES GLANZ and WALTER GIBBS

OSLO — Peter W. Galbraith, an influential former American ambassador, is a powerful voice on Iraq who helped shape the views of policy makers like Joseph R. Biden Jr. and John Kerry. In the summer of 2005, he was also an adviser to the Kurdish regional government as Iraq wrote its Constitution — tough and sensitive talks not least because of issues like how Iraq would divide its vast oil wealth.

Now Mr. Galbraith, 58, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars as a result of his closeness to the Kurds, his relations with a Norwegian oil company and constitutional provisions he helped the Kurds extract.

In the constitutional negotiations, he helped the Kurds ram through provisions that gave their region — rather than the central Baghdad government — sole authority over many of their internal affairs, including clauses that he maintains will give the Kurds virtually complete control over all new oil finds on their territory.

If this had been an advisor to Dick Cheney, libs would be leaping from tall buildings (Glenn Greenwald may leap anyway).  Instead, the Times is utterly and absurdly opaque on the Biden connection:

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say.

Joe Biden did not advocate partitioning Iraq?  Uh huh, and Dick Cheney never worked for Halliburton.

Meanwhile, back here in reality we are left wondering, if Biden never avocated the partition of Iraq then why did the Times print this guest rubbish from none other than Peter Galbraith back in 2007:

IN a surge of realism, the Senate has voted 75-23 to acknowledge that Iraq has broken up and cannot be put back together. The measure, co-sponsored by Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, and Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, supports a plan for Iraq to become a loose confederation of three regions — a Kurdish area in the north, a Shiite region in the south and a Sunni enclave in the center — with the national government in Baghdad having few powers other than to manage the equitable distribution of oil revenues.

While the nonbinding measure provoked strong reactions in Iraq and from the Bush administration, it actually called for exactly what Iraq’s Constitution already provides — and what is irrevocably becoming the reality on the ground.

And why did the Times accept this piece in May 2006 from Leslie Gelb and a what I infer is a Biden pretender calling for the partition of Iraq?  Why did they tell us in 2007 and 2008 that Biden favored the partition of Iraq?

Back when Biden-advisor Galbraith was positioning himself to make millions with the Kurds, Biden was advocating the policies that would help Galbraith achieve just that.  For the Times to pretend otherwise is absurd.  The only argument I can imagine them making in support of their burial of the Biden connection is that as of November 12, 2009, Joe Biden no longer advocates the partition of Iraq.  So what?

To their credit the Times does acknowledge that this is a story by front-paging it; after they reprise their own archives it may dawn on them that the story is not limited to one opportunistic “private citizen” but points directly to the judgment of the Vice President.

Powerline posts about Democrat war policies. How bizarre that gasbag  Joe Biden gets taken seriously on foreign policy.

Biden argued against Reagan putting missiles in Europe (which helped forced the end of the Soviet empire), voted against the first Gulf War (which kept Saddam from controlling more than 25% of the world’s oil) and told everyone who’d listen that Iraq must be partitioned into three countries.

The editors of the Washington Post examine the “Pakistan First” policy being championed by Vice President Biden in response to the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Under this approach, the U.S. would put Afghanistan on the “back burner” and attack al Qaeda targets in Pakistan with drones or special forces, while backing the government of Pakistan as it attempts to pacify and develop parts of Pakistan where Al Qaeda and the Taliban are flourishing.

This, of course, is the latest variation on an old Democratic play — accept defeat in the war we’re fighting under the guise of focusing on some other military action so as to avoid the appearance of weakness. It wasn’t long ago that the Democrats were promoting an “Afghanistan First” policy as a pretext for abandoning Iraq.

Thus has the Democrats’ defeatist two-step become a defeatist three-step.

To make matters worse, the shell game the Dems are playing now lacks even the surface plausibility of the “Afghanistan First” policy. When it came to Iraq and Afghanistan, one could argue that the real enemy was to be found in the latter venue. When it comes to Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s essentially the same enemy, and ceding Afghanistan to that enemy would have major and adverse implications for Pakistan.

This is the point the Post’s editors make. They note that Pakistan’s leaders consider the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan to be, in the words of the Pakistani foreign minister, “a mortal threat to their country.” The Post also reminds us that elements of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services are sympathetic to the Taliban. If the U.S. retreats in Afghanistan, these elements will be strengthened at the expense of the pro-Western government.

At that point, Biden and his fellow Democratic defeatists can abandon Pakistan on the theory that the government no longer supports our efforts. We can then implement our “Indonesia First” strategy.

The Obama administration will scrap the controversial missile defense shield program in Eastern Europe, a senior administration official confirmed to CNN Thursday.

The comment followed similar statements from officials in Poland and the Czech Republic — where key elements of the system were to be located — but was the first confirmation from an American official.

Vice President Joe Biden earlier refused to confirm to CNN that the George W. Bush-era plan was being shelved.

But he did explain the logic of doing so, saying Iran — a key concern for the United States — was not a threat.

“I think we are fully capable and secure dealing with any present or future potential Iranian threat,” he told CNN’s Chris Lawrence in Baghdad, where he is on a brief trip.

Joe Biden’s grasp of foreign policy should be taken with a grain bucket of salt.

After all, he invented history during the VEEP debate.

When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, “Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.” Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.

Unemployment is past 10% in a couple of states and close to that nationally.

So what does team Obama do? Send out Joe Biden to piss on our legs and tell us it’s raining.

“The Recovery Act is doing more, faster and more efficiently, and more effectively than most people expected,” he said.

Except the money has hardly been spent. (And we hope it never is.)

“One of the criticisms of the recovery act is that it is simply a grab bag of different programs,” Biden said. “But the fact that the recovery act is multifaceted doesn’t reflect a lack of design. It is the design. Our economy is so complex and so wounded that reinvigorating one segment alone — or using one tool alone — would never do all that needs to be done.”

So all that waste? It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

Then there’s the old stand by, “the conversation” Democrats are always talking about.

“The Recovery Act has played a significant role in changing the trajectory of our economy and changing the conversation about the economy in this country,” Biden said in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “Instead of talking about the beginning of a depression, we are talking about the end of a recession.”

Memo to Biden: you’re team started the Depression talk as a way to scare voters into electing you.

James Lileks:

It takes years of yoga to learn the posture necessary for speaking clearly with all your feet in your mouth. But for some the skill comes naturally, which brings us to Joe Biden. Those who saw Dick Cheney as an evil genius crouched silent in the shadows of the Oval Office like Nosferatu must enjoy Biden’s high profile: he’s out there daily with the sunny enthusiasm of Ronald McDonald opening another store. And, quite often, telling everyone to have a Whopper.

The “gaffes,” as we call unscripted thoughts, come delightfully often with Biden. The latest: Speaking before the AARP, Biden aarped up a peculiar formulation to explain the need to borrow 3.2 bejillion dollars in order to transform the American health care system, preferably by next week. He said people ask him “What are you talking about, you’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt? The answer is yes, ‘I’m telling you.’”

In Vietnam-era terms: we have to burn the hospital in order to save it. Even if that means losing the burn unit.

In one sense, Biden’s logic isn’t new; anyone who said we had to partition Iraq to save it is perfectly capable of believing we have to dig a deep hole now to keep from falling into a deeper hole later. But how does this fit with Biden’s other summer misstatements? Let’s take a quick review.

Iran. Earlier this month George Stephanopoulos asked Biden if the US would stand in the way of Israel decided it was time to take out Iran’s nuke program. Said the Veep: “We cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do … if they make a determination that they’re existentially threatened and their survival is threatened by another country.”

True. But wrong! The sensible thing is to say: “We are seriously concerned about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and strongly support serious efforts to be concerned, in coordination with allies whose serious efforts are concerned with — hey, is that a mushroom cloud on CNN? Turn the sound up.” Everyone knows Iran will give up the bomb, but in their own way: by putting it on a rocket and waving safe journey, Allah-speed. As the saying goes: If you love something, set it free. If the US isn’t going to stop them, shouldn’t Israel have the right to?

But that’s not the official line, so YANK went the collar. Administration officials explained that the Vice President was using secret reverse-talking, and the allies remain committed to a sustained effort to frown and grip the podium while hoping there’s no follow-up questions.

Swine Flu. Should we panic? “I would tell members of my family — and I have — I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now,” Biden said, adding, “When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft.” This statement was so true it was retracted by the end of the day. When the experts — i.e., cable-news reporters on the medical beat — start talking about Pig-Pandemic bringing down human civilization, everyone’s first reaction is to stay away from planes and trains. But a Leader is supposed to say something calming, like “if you’re taking a flight full of feverish travelers back from Cancun, don’t lick the tray tables.”

The Economy. Also in early July, Biden said “We misread how bad the economy was.” This one is a bit different to explain away, since the administration billed itself as having super-genius comprehension of the problem and the necessary solutions. Now, many suspect, President Obama finds himself staring at a portrait of FDR, murmuring “Help me, Obi-Wan. You’re my only hope.”

What Biden meant to say, in his puckish way, that they misunderstood what an economy is, and how it works. Piling up a mountain of proposed taxes, mandates, regulations, do-nothing programs and pork unseen in such dimensions since Pink Floyd floated a dirigible pig over an outdoor concert might, in fact, prevent recovery.

So do not criticize him; applaud his palaver, and hope for more. Biden’s “gaffes” are anything but — they’re simply what the administration is really thinking. Truer words have never been babbled.

When you are vice president of the United States, you can control a lot of things. One thing you cannot control, as Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. discovered Friday morning here, is the weather. Mr. Biden, on a two-day diplomatic mission to Iraq – his first trip to the country since becoming vice president — had intended to get around town a bit, and had hoped to fly by helicopter to a breakfast meeting Friday morning with the top American commander here, General Ray Odierno, and the new ambassador, Christopher Hill. Instead, he was grounded by intense sandstorms — but not before he got a chance to fly.

Nowhere did the NYT remind readers that gasbag Joe Biden once proclaimed that Iraq could not survive as a single nation and must be (contrary to the will of its elected government) be partititioned into three countries.

Biden was wrong about Iraq. Obama was wrong about Iraq. Both are willing to take credit for the success of George. W. Bush.

Journalists get fired for inventing facts. Joe Biden just keeps on bullshitting.

Republican strategist Karl Rove called Vice President Biden a “liar” on Thursday, dramatically escalating a feud between Biden and aides to former President George W. Bush over Biden’s claims to have rebuked Bush in private meetings.

“I hate to say this, but he’s a serial exaggerator,” Rove told FOX News. “If I was being unkind I would say liar. But it is a habit he ought to drop.”

Rove added: “You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the Vice President of the United States.”

Biden’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, although Biden spokesman Jay Carney told Fox on Wednesday: “The vice president stands by his remarks.”

Carney was referring to two controversial assertions by Biden, the latest coming Tuesday during an interview on CNN.

“I remember President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office,” Biden began, “‘Well, Joe,’ he said, ‘I’m a leader.’ And I said: ‘Mr. President, turn and around look behind you. No one is following.’”

The exchange is purely “fictional,” said Rove, who was Bush’s top political adviser in the White House.

“It didn’t happen,” Rove, a FOX News contributor and former Bush adviser, told Megyn Kelly in an interview taped for “On The Record.” “It’s his imagination; it’s a made-up, fictional world.

“He ought to get out of it and get back to reality,” Rove added. “He’s making this up out of whole cloth.”

Biden also invented facts for the debate with Sarah Palin, but never got called on it by Big Baloney. It’s an old habit:

Vice President Cheney had a little fun at his successor-to-be’s expense today, telling Fox News Sunday that he didn’t take Joe Biden’s criticism of his tenure too seriously because Joe Biden doesn’t know the Constitution from a hole in the ground.  Bill Sammon reports that Cheney said:  “Joe’s been chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a member of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate for 36 years, teaches constitutional law back in Delaware, and can’t keep straight which article of the Constitution provides for the legislature and which provides for the executive. So I think I’d write that off as campaign rhetoric. I don’t take it seriously.”  Cheney was referring to Biden’s VP debate gaffe in which he confused Articles of the Constitution addressing the authority of the Legislative Branch (Article I) and the Executive Branch (Article II).

Biden “bit back,” according to Sammon, but unfortunately, he seems to have bitten himself.  According to Biden, Cheney’s “notion of a unitary executive, meaning that, in time of war, essentially all power, you know, goes to the executive, I think is dead wrong.”  Well, once again, Mr. Biden, that’s no one’s notion of the unitary executive except confused Democrats.

The unitary executive is simply a recognition, from the first sentence of Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, that the “executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”  For the umpteenth time, it is not a theory that the president’s power is somehow enhanced, at the expense of Congress, during wartime.  It is merely a recognition that there is only one (i.e., uni-tary) executive and that any efforts by Congress to give executive authority to someone other than the President is unconstitutional.  It is not a theory about the balance of power between the branches, but a statement about the authority of the president within the Executive Branch.  The “notion” that a “unitary executive” means that “in time of war, essentially all power, goes to the executive,” is indeed dead wrong.  But it’s Biden’s misconception of that theory that is wrong, not Cheney’s.

Keep it up, Joe.  At this rate, you’ll know more about the Constitution than your non-lawyer predecessor in, well, never.

And they said Sarah Palin wasn’t fit to be VEEP.

Breitbart:

In this clip, McCain spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer presses Andrea Mitchell to play all of the audio of Joe Biden’s comments to supporters where he predicts an “international crisis” if Obama is elected. Mitchell says, “I think we played the whole thing.” But as Breitbart.tv documented on Tuesday, the clip that Mitchell used was not from the Seattle event, but rather much milder comments made in San Francisco. MSNBC has even labeled the incorrect audio as being from the Seattle event.

Link:

Michelle Malkin:

If the prospect of Joe Biden sitting a heartbeat away from the presidency doesn’t give you palpitations, you are not paying attention.

Hysterical Sarah Palin-bashers on the unhinged Left and Elitist right have dominated campaign press coverage and pop culture. They’ve ridiculed her family, her appearance, and her speech patterns. They’ve derided her character, her parenting skills, her readiness, and her intellect.

Meanwhile, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Joe Biden gets a pass. What does the guy have to do to earn the relentless scrutiny and merciless mockery he deserves? Answer: wear high heels, shoot caribou and change the “D” next to his name to an “R.”

Team Obama is hammering John McCain as “erratic” in the closing days of the election campaign. There are now 615,000 Google hits and counting using the search terms “erratic McCain.” Last week, the New York Times devoted an entire article to the Obama-Biden line of attack, titled “In Friendly Region, Biden Cites McCain as Erratic.”

Who’s erratic? Throughout the primary and general election cycles, Biden has lurched from attacking Obama as not ready for prime time (“The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.” — September 2007) to ready to lead (“Barack Obama is ready. This is his time.” — August 2008) and back again.

This week, Biden warned America that an Obama victory would invite a dangerous global showdown between tyrants and the naif Obama. “Mark my words,” Biden said Sunday at a Democratic fundraiser. “It will not be six months [after the inauguration] before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.” In a follow-up appearance, he told supporters to brace for the worst and “gird your loins.”

Out of Biden’s mouth, this is called candor. Out of anyone else’s mouth, it would be “fear-mongering,” “negative campaigning” and a “distraction.”

Tooting his own horn while vandalizing his running mate’s, Biden bragged: “I’ve forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know.” Yeah. Colleagues like that guy who had a mere 143 days of Senate experience before launching his presidential bid and choosing you to shore up his meager credibility, Joe.

In fact, Biden has spent the entire campaign questioning his running mate’s judgment. Last month, he mused out loud: “Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. … She is easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America, and quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me.” Biden assailed the campaign’s position on clean coal, openly criticized the campaign’s idiotic ad attacking McCain for not using e-mail and warned the pro-gun control Obama that “if he tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem.”

All true, but Biden is such a confident bullshitter, he comes across as knowledgeable. Todd Zywicki

Some thoughtful people simply have a tendency to confuse intelligence with the ability to be glib, or more precisely, to bs. And I think that is much of what it comes down to–if Palin doesn’t know the answer to a question, she just isn’t that good at making something up. Biden, by contrast, is a master bs’er, as his debate performance exhibited. As a general rule, the less informed he was about the answer to a question, the more assertive he was in answering it, such as his extraordinary answer about the legislative role of the Vice-President.

It is clear that he had not the slightest idea what he was talking about, yet he just plowed ahead throwing out assertions with rhetorical flair. Classic bs. Even on issues that were supposedly in his area of expertise, such as the Constitution, he wasn’t even in the ballpark of being correct. Hoven picks up on Biden’s whopper of answer about kicking Hezbollah out of Lebanon, but it is pretty much the same thing–aggressive bs covering a complete lack of any clue what he is talking about.

Tom Maguire:

If Obama becomes President his popularity will sag and he will make unpopular decisions widely viewed as unsound.

No, that’s not my opinion.  My source is the always entertaining Joe Biden, who seems intent on lowering expectations to the point that the nation will marvel if Obama has the competence and vision to remember to show up on Jan 20 to be sworn in.

“I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, ‘Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?’ We’re gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I’m asking you now, I’m asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point because you’re going to have to reinforce us.”

“There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, ‘Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don’t know about that decision’,” Biden continued. “Because if you think the decision is sound when they’re made, which I believe you will when they’re made, they’re not likely to be as popular as they are sound. Because if they’re popular, they’re probably not sound.”

I don’t like the sound of that.  The good decisions won’t be popular?  The suspense is killing me.  And speaking of killing me, what about this fear-mongering from Biden?

“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you – not financially to help him – we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

Oh, great – so per Biden, after Obama gets the 3 AM phone call we will all think he blew it.  I deplore this negative, attack-oriented campaigning.  C’mon, Joe, give me a reason to Go With O!

Hmm – people deplored similar fear-mongering from Hillary and Rudy.  Seasons change.

Jennifer Rubin has fun:

Well, golly, if Obama is so untested that we will have a series of international crises — at the very time we are in a financial meltdown — which will make the Cuban Missile Crisis look like a walk in the park, shouldn’t we vote for the other guy who will keep all the miscreants in their place? Now, maybe we should rest easy because, according to Biden, “I’ve forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know, so I’m not being falsely humble with you.” (Maybe Hezbollah’s occupation of Lebanon was one of the things he forgot.)

Some expert. Biden opposed Reagan’s handling of the Soviet Union, voted against the Gulf War, voted against the Surge and demanded that Iraq be partitioned into three countries.

The Captain reminds us of Kennedy’s meeting with Krushchev “without preconditions”:

What resulted?  The Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy wound up trading strategic intel and missile installations in western Asia in exchange for Soviet withdrawal of the nuclear missiles from Cuba.  The entire Kennedy administration turned out to be a foreign-policy disaster that was only overlooked because of the tragic assassination of Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.

I agree with Biden.  Obama is exactly like Kennedy in this regard, and our enemies will test us by threatening our interests around the globe if we elect Obama.  I’d rather avoid the problem altogether and elect a man who puts enough fear into the minds of our enemies to keep them from testing us at all.

Biden is trying to put lipstick on the Bay of Pigs.

Andrew McCarthy details the incoherence of Joe Biden’s positions over the years.

Arianna Huffington shows how shallow the left is.

Watching Biden and Palin on the same stage was like watching a tennis champion walk onto Centre Court at Wimbledon only to find himself facing an over-eager amateur from the local high school. Or as Pat Mitchell told me, “Biden was taking part in a vice presidential debate; Palin was taking part in a junior high debate.”

Here’s how Esther Dyson put it: “It’s pretty clear that Biden spent decades getting ready for this debate, learning from experience; Palin spent a couple of weeks, learning from handlers and speech coaches.”

Biden is a champion gaffer. Did she not hear him assert that Hezbollah had been run out of Lebanon?

He’s proved himself a dolt in his supposed area of expertise: wrong on the Soviet Union, wrong about Desert Storm, wrong about the surge, wrong about partitioning Iraq. Gullible people, many of them media elites, mistake his confidently delivered twaddle as erudition. God help us.

But boy, he has all that experience! What a pro!

Huffington fumes:

The moment that most drove me to want to send her a book on Greek gods and heroes was her head-scratching response to the question about her Achilles heel. She apparently didn’t know what that meant since she spent her allotted time listing all of her attributes as opposed to her most glaring weakness.

Let’s go to the transcript:

IFILL: Let’s talk conventional wisdom for a moment. The conventional wisdom, Gov. Palin with you, is that your Achilles heel is that you lack experience. Your conventional wisdom against you is that your Achilles heel is that you lack discipline, Sen. Biden. What id it really for you, Gov. Palin? What is it really for you, Sen. Biden? Start with you, governor.

PALIN: My experience as an executive will be put to good use as a mayor and business owner and oil and gas regulator and then as governor of a huge state, a huge energy producing state that is accounting for much progress towards getting our nation energy independence and that’s extremely important…

Or perhaps Palin figured out she didn’t need to answer a stupid question. Here is how Biden responded:

BIDEN: You’re very kind suggesting my only Achilles Heel is my lack of discipline.

Others talk about my excessive passion. I’m not going to change. I have 35 years in public office. People can judge who I am. I haven’t changed in that time.

Boasting, boasting, boasting.

BIDEN: And, by the way, a record of change — I will place my record and Barack’s record against John McCain’s or anyone else in terms of fundamental accomplishments. Wrote the crime bill, put 100,000 cops on the street, wrote the Violence Against Women Act, which John McCain voted against both of them, was the catalyst to change the circumstance in Bosnia, led by President Clinton, obviously.

Then Biden segued into his chokeup moment about his wife dying and his son being hurt, like an actor summoning a sad memory to make a performance seem real.

Huffington ate it up.

In the greatest disconnect of the evening, Palin repeatedly went to the Reagan well, offering up such Gipper classics as “there you go again” and that “shining city on the hill.” But, really, during a week in which John McCain hopped on board Bush’s $700 billion bailout, did Palin not see how incongruous it was to insist that government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem?

And declare that all we need to get this country back on track is for the government to get out of our way? Isn’t that what got us where we are today?

No, it did not.

An activist government started the mortgage meltdown ball rolling with its affirmative action lending initiatives. Then a quasi-government entity (which greased plenty of Democrat pols to keep hands off) enabled lenders to write risky loans and send them up the food chain.

Left alone, banks never would have made these loans.

Just who is clueless? Huffington also gripes about the way Palin talks. Anyone who’s heard Arianna’s Greek screech can only chuckle.

On that note, Victor Davis Hanson wrote about Palin:

Much of Palin’s appeal and much of why she apparently grates on others is her accent, colloquialisms, grammar, seeming simplicity, and mannerisms—which are a lot like the wily, sing-songy voiced hero of Fargo,  Marge Gunderson. In her methodical, seemingly plodding way, the pregnant Marge systematically figures out the complex criminal labyrinth, and then in courageous fashion wades into the thicket unaware perhaps of the danger from the supposedly more clever involved, but confident that what has worked for her in the past and gotten her this far will see her through just fine as usual. 

Fair or not, Palin is the emblem of underestimated Middle Americans wading in over their heads, not changing with the times, and in the end finishing the job and outsmarting the rest. Six-term Senator, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden, once fervent supporter of an Iraqi war (dating back to the Clinton years), once fervent opponent of the war, once fervent advocate of trisecting Iraq, once fervent critic of Obama on Iraq, once fervent surge won’t//will work, once fervent everything…, apparently didn’t see Fargo.

Rich Lowry: 

A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It’s one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O’Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat. Palin too projects through the screen like crazy.

I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing.

It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it.

She’s also authentically middle class, something you cannot fake. Whether that means anything in terms of governance is a separate issue. But it contrasts with Joe Biden’s phoniness:

Look, all you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie’s Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me where I spend a lot of time and you ask anybody in there whether or not the economic and foreign policy of this administration has made them better off in the last eight years.

Katie’s restaurant has been gone 25-30 years, according to locals who kinda remember the place, and it was not on Union Street.

When Gerald Ford suggested in the 1976 debate that Poland was not under the domination of the Soviet Union, it was big news the next day.  Y’know, Ford must be a dolt.

Different rules apply to Dems. Don’t expect Biden to get called on these from last night:

1. Claiming that Article 1 of the Constitution defines the role of the Vice-President. It does not; it defines the legislative branch.
2. Claiming we spend as much in Iraq in a week as we have in Afghanistan in six or seven years. He’s off by 2000 percent.
3. Saying, “When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said, and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there.  Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.” Hezbollah was never kicked out of Lebanon.

That’s just a few. McCain’s campaign has its list here.

Michael Totten, who has reported first hand from Lebanon noted this:

Nobody – nobody – has ever kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. Not the United States. Not France. Not Israel. And not the Lebanese. Nobody.

Joe Biden has literally no idea what he’s talking about.

It’s too bad debate moderator Gwen Ifill didn’t catch him and ask a follow up question: When did the United States and France kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon?

The answer? Never. And did Biden and Senator Barack Obama really say NATO troops should be sent into Lebanon? When did they say that? Why would they say that? They certainly didn’t say it because NATO needed to prevent Hezbollah from returning–since Hezbollah never went anywhere.

I tried to chalk this one up as just the latest of Biden’s colorful gaffes. Did he mean to say “we kicked Syria out of Lebanon?” But that wouldn’t make any more sense. First of all, the Lebanese kicked Syria out of Lebanon. Not the United States, and not France. But he clearly meant to say Hezbollah, not Syria, because he correctly notes just a few sentences later that Hezbollah is part of Lebanon’s government. He wasn’t talking about Syria. He was talking about Hezbollah all the way through, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of his outlandish assertion.

Regarding Obama’s naive promise to meet with Iran’s nutter without preconditions, which Biden claimed was not true, we’ll let Obama’s own website state the facts:

BTW, it’s not as if any of the ideas outlined by Obama have not been tried. He pretends Bush stuck his fingers in his ears and starting humming whenever Iran came up.

Jim Treacher:

Mayor Palin, Barack Obama is a handsome, charismatic demigod. How many boxes of Kleenex will you need after your crushing loss?

Senator Biden, what is your favorite color? And if you have time for a follow-up question: Why?

Mayor, you talk funny and you own a tanning bed. Why haven’t you released Trig’s birth certificate?

Senator, have you seen those pictures of Obama in his swim trunks? If not, I have them right here.

Mayor, what are the names, ages, and blood types of all 71 members of the Belgian Senate? And why are you unwilling to admit that your inability to instantly produce any and every fact I demand makes you unfit to stand in the way of history?

Senator, you’ve spoken at length. Could you please continue?

Mayor, which is your preferred method of stifling dissent, banning books or burning them? Since it’s both, please explain how you can deny the accusation that you’re a fascist, which I am making now.

Victor Davis Hanson has some fun grafting Biden’s gaffes onto you know who:

“What was John McCain thinking in selecting the gaffe-prone Gov. Sarah Palin?”

In what has now become a disturbing pattern, the Alaska governor seems either unable or unwilling to avoid embarrassing statements that are often as untrue as they are outrageous. Recently, for example, in an exclusive interview with news anchor Katie Couric, Palin gushed, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’ ” Apparently the former Alaskan beauty queen failed to realize that in 1929 there was neither widespread television nor was Franklin Roosevelt even President.

Sometimes the Idaho-native Palin seems to confuse and embarrass her own running mate. Shortly after her nomination, she introduced a “John McAmerica;” then she referred to the Republican ticket as the “Palin-McCain administration;” and finished by calling Sen. Obama, “Senator George Obama.” The Palin gaffes seem to be endless: on her way to Washington to meet the national press corps, Palin, the mother of five, once again stumbled — this time characterizing Senator Biden as “Congressman Joe Biden,” who, she chuckled, was “good looking.”

Just imagine if Sarah Palin had said this. Or McCain. But here’s Biden:

“Part of what being a leader does is to instill confidence is to demonstrate what he or she knows what they are talking about and to communicating to people … this is how we can fix this.

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘look, here’s what happened.’”

Part of being a leader is knowing who was president (Hoover, not FDR). 

Note that Katie Couric, like the New York Times and others key members of Big Baloney, still hasn’t read the text of the sex education bill Obama championed.

It’s nice to see Joe Biden taken to task, even if just once. Jim Geraghty:

The McCain Campaign is chuckling over this exchange from Sunday:

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer: “He [Joe Biden] was on the Today Show. He opposed the bailout of AIG and then the Obama campaign the next day said there was no choice. Did Joe Biden make the same mistake that John McCain made?”

Austan Goolsbee: “Well, I would — we don’t have the transcript here, but I have read it and I would disagree a little bit. It was clear from the entire paragraph that Joe Biden was not saying he was opposing a bailout. What he was saying was that it’s not their first choice along the lines of where John McCain ended up and where Senator Obama was all along.”

Blitzer: “It was a pretty clear. I watched it that morning. It was pretty clear. He opposed the bailout, too, although, as you say, the position of the Obama campaign seemed to change based — assuming that Joe Biden speaks for the Obama campaign — it changed the next day, as well.”

Because they went back to the transcript:

NBC’S MEREDITH VIEIRA: “But now we have this mess, Senator. Do you think that AIG should be bailed out by the federal government?”

BIDEN: “No, I don’t think they should be bailed out by the federal government. I’ll tell you what we should do. We should try to correct the problems that caused this. And what’s caused this is the profligate tax cuts to the very, very wealthy that John wants to continue.” (NBC’s “Today,” 9/16/08)

So yes, Goolsbee’s “these words do not mean what everyone thinks they mean” argument is worth a chuckle. But how about Biden’s assertion that “the problem that caused this” is “tax cuts to the wealthy”? In what economics textbook does it say, “if you cut taxes on the wealthy, you will prompt one of the world’s largest companies to overvalue subprime mortgage-backed securities, causing a liquidity crisis”?

Why does Biden have the “wise man” reputation that he does? If you asked Biden why his oatmeal was cold, would he blame tax cuts for the wealthy?

UPDATE: In light of Biden’s comments, wouldn’t it be fair for Charlie Gibson to ask, “Senator Biden, are you on a mission from God to raise taxes?”

If Sarah Palin says something dumb, it will be taken as evidence of a weak intellect.

When Joe Biden says something dumb, it’s because of “weak filters.”

…the reality for Mr. Biden is that while running mates are second-fiddlers by definition, the phenomenon of Ms. Palin has rendered him something of a fourth or fifth fiddle. It is not like last month, when reporters swarmed Mr. Biden’s Delaware home and delegates swooned at the Democratic convention. He is now trailed by just a few national reporters, and struggling to break through in a race marked by historic firsts, political celebrities and charismatic newcomers — none named Joe Biden.

The Obama campaign was hoping to reintroduce Mr. Biden this week as running mate attack dog. But his penchant for verbal rambling ensured that much of the attention he drew was unwanted: he said wealthy Americans had a “patriotic” duty to pay more taxes, a remark the McCain campaign mocked relentlessly.

Yet Joltin’ Joe has also become a fascinating Off Broadway spectacle in his own right. He is a distinctive blend of pit bull and odd duck whose weak filters make him capable of blurting out pretty much anything — “gaffes,” out-of-nowhere comments (pivoting midspeech to say “Excuse my back!” to people seated behind him), goofy asides (tapping a reporter’s chest and telling him, “You need to work on your pecs.”)

Nope, not Sarah Palin. Joe Biden, aka Mr. Generous (he donated an average $329/year to charity for the last decade.

“Catholic social doctrine as I was taught it is, you take care of people who need the help the most,” he said. “Now it’d be different if you could make the case to me that by giving this tax cut to the very wealthy, everybody else was going to be better off. We saw what happened the last eight years when we gave that tax cut.”

That is, the Pope says render unto Washington.