Joe Biden's phony reputation
BETSY'S PAGE
Every pundit last night after the debate seemed to agree that Biden won on points because he was so knowledgeable and experienced. And now we're finding out how much of what he said was just plain wrong. The list keeps growing. Michael J. Totten details his total blunder on Lebanon.
..........In Thursday night's vice presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin, Biden said the strangest and most ill-informed thing I have ever heard about Lebanon in my life. "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.
What on Earth is he talking about? The United States and France may have kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon in an alternate universe, but nothing even remotely like that ever happened in this one.
Nobody – nobody – has ever kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. Not the United States. Not France. Not Israel. And not the Lebanese. Nobody.
Remember. Foreign policy is supposed to be his area of specialty...................
Apparently, as reported by Adam Yoshida, Afghanistan is also not an area of expertise for Biden. Add in his aggressive stance on Darfur and his twisting to try to explain his vote for the war in Iraq.
............Biden is telling absurd lies about Afghanistan tonight. In particular, he's repeatedly claimed that "we've spent less in Afghanistan in seven years than we spend in a month in Iraq."
He's made that claim, or claims to that effect, repeatedly. It is, to put it bluntly, a complete Goddamned lie.
According to the Congressional Research Service, spending on the war in Afghanistan since 2001 has been $172 Billion. Spending in Iraq is, as the Democrats repeatedly mention, a little under $10 Billion a month.
In other words, Biden's number is off by, oh, something like 2000%. Perhaps Obama's Sub-Committee ought to have held some hearings on Afghanistan after all.
As a side note, amazingly, Biden just fell apart on foreign policy there. Did he really promise that Obama would launch a war in Darfur? Never mind his whole mess of an answer on his vote for the Iraq War. Does anyone think that it's really even remotely credible that Joe Biden voted to give George Bush the authority to go to war because he thought he wouldn't use it? If Joe Biden did that, he's among the stupidest men alive.
Here's the exact words that Biden used, from the rush transcript:
"With Afghanistan, facts matter, Gwen."
- Joe Biden
"Look, we have spent more money -- we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country.
Let me say that again. Three weeks in Iraq; seven years, seven years or six-and-a-half years in Afghanistan. Now, that's number one."
- Joe Biden, seconds later..............
Jim Geraghty builds on the Republican list of 14 Biden lies and is now up to 24 lies or misstatements from Biden last night. Among them is this claim about Pakistan.
..........."Pakistan already has nuclear weapons. Pakistan already has deployed nuclear weapons. Pakistan's weapons can already hit Israel and the Mediterranean."
The distance between Israel and Pakistan is 2,085 miles, or 3355 kilometers...
This site indicates that the top range of Pakistani missile that can carry a nuclear warhead is 1000 miles. By being off by 1,000 or so, I'm now upgrading this to full lie/error/hallucination status..............
And then there were his denials that Obama had promised to meet with Iranian leaders without preconditions when Obama still has that promise on his website!. Of course, Obama was quite clear in the Youtube debate that he would meet without preconditions with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea. He's been trying to walk back that answer ever since. And Biden was willing to criticize Obama at the time.
............. Afterward, other candidates echoed Clinton's criticism. Sen. Joseph Biden, who has emerged as the clear-eyed antiwar realist in the Democratic race, told National Review Online that the idea of a president meeting with Ahmadinejad, Chavez, and others was "naïve." "World leaders should not meet with other world leaders unless they know what the agenda is, so you don't end up being used," Biden said. "When I went to meet with Milosevic before the war, the condition I met with him was that no press would be available, I'd only meet him in his office late at night, and I wouldn't dignify being seen with him."...............
Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post catalogs even more Biden lies/misstatements/errors on Iraq, Afghanistan and then with this final bit.
..............Lastly, Biden asserted that both he and Obama had opposed the staging of Palestinian legislative elections in 2005, and had predicted that if they were held Hamas would win. In fact, while Obama signed a letter (with more than 90 other senators) expressing concern that Hamas would participate in the election without disarming, he did not predict the Hamas victory. And Biden did not sign the letter; indeed, he served as an observer at the election that he now says should not have gone forward...................
So when you hear again and again how Biden is adding his expertise to the Obama ticket, listen with a mental footnote warning you that you have to take a whole lot of what he says with a heavy dose of skepticism.
Of course, it's still true that Sarah Palin didn't know enough about any of these topics to call Biden on anything he said. And I didn't either. The pundits delivering their verdict that Biden displayed a virtuosity that so outclassed Palin didn't realize it either. But that is what we have the internet for - to give us information that you don't get from the MSM. Palin wasn't error-free, of course, but what gripes conservatives are the unearned accolades that Biden receives for his display of knowledge and wisdom.
Victor Davis Hanson looks at the series of gaffes that Biden had been making even before the debate and imagines how it would seem if Palin was the one who had made those blunders. It truly is an alternate universe. The journalists just laugh and say, "Oh, that Joe." Since they're used to his making these kinds of mistakes and his grandiosity, they just shrug it off.
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