Monday, October 20, 2008

Elect Obama and invite an attack - Biden - Update

Slow Joe Biden made a gaffe*. He was supposed to wait until after the election before he told this truth. Obama will invite a "test," maybe an attack, maybe not. But, having no foreign policy experience and no leadership experience the bad guys will test him. Thanks, Joe. This might be in time to help. ABC Political Radar:
"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."
* Michael Kinsley explains that a "gaffe in Washington" - now known as a Kinsley gaffe - is when a politician slips and tells the truth he was supposed to be hiding. Update. The New York Post analyzes Biden's truthful gaffe.
What's particularly disturbing is Biden's Kennedy analogy. For those who don't recall, it was a scant five months after JFK became president that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev took his measure. Kennedy had just bungled the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, then went off to a summit in Vienna - where Khruschev determined that the rookie chief executive could be had. Two months later, construction began on the Berlin Wall, precipitating a crisis that nearly led to a US-Soviet shooting war in Europe. And 14 months after that came the Cuban Missile Crisis - when nuclear Armageddon was only barely averted.
And
More important: What if he makes the wrong decision - as even Joe Biden suggests he might? After all, Obama was wrong about the troop surge in Iraq. And he was wrong in his initial response to Russia's invasion of Georgia - when he urged the victimized nation to "show restraint." And he was wrong when he said he would gladly sit down unconditionally with people like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - the very people his own running-mate now says are planning to "test" him.

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