According to USA Today, in an interview Vice President Biden said that
former president George W. Bush deserved some credit for sending additional troops to Iraq in 2007. But even though Biden said the surge worked militarily, he said he didn’t regret his vote in the Senate against it because Bush did not include a plan to address Iraq’s political problems. “I don’t regret a thing, what I said or did about Iraq policy,” he said. It was the Obama administration, Biden said, that put in the plan that led to success. “What was lacking in the past was a coherent political process.”
Where oh where to begin? Perhaps with a short journey down Memory Lane.
In January 2007, after President Bush announced the so-called surge of forces in Iraq, then-Senator Joseph Biden declared: “If he surges another 20, 30 [thousand], or whatever number he’s going to, into Baghdad, it’ll be a tragic mistake.” He called it “doomed” and “a fantasy.”
“The surge isn’t going to work either tactically or strategically,” Biden assured the Boston Globe in the summer of 2007. Even well into 2008, when the surge had made undeniable progress, Biden was still insisting it was a failure, that Bush had no strategy, and that “there is little evidence the Iraqis will settle their differences peacefully any time soon.”
If you’d like to see Biden in his own inimitable words, take a look at this.
One would be hard pressed to think of another person who was as persistently and consistently wrong about the surge as Biden (though Barack Obama would give him a good run for his money). Biden went so far as to advocate dividing up Iraq into three parts based on ethnicity, one of the more ill-informed and dangerous ideas to emerge among war critics.
The truth is that if Joe Biden had had his way, the war would have been lost, Iraq would probably be engulfed in something close to genocide, al-Qaeda would have emerged with its most important victory ever, and America would have sustained a defeat far worse than it did in Vietnam.
As for Biden’s claim that what was lacking in the past was a “coherent political process,” let’s be generous to the vice president: he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The then-American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, was one of its outstanding diplomats. And unlike the situation in Afghanistan under the Obama administration, in Iraq the commanding general at the time (David Petraeus) and the U.S. ambassador (Crocker) worked hand-in-glove. They were an extraordinarily effective team. In order to refresh Biden’s memory of the coherent political process that was in place, he might want to review Ambassador Crocker’s Senate testimony from September 2007, before a committee Biden himself sat on.
Of course, none of what Biden said is especially surprising. Over the years he has shown himself to be loquacious, personable, comically self-important (this video is priceless), and a somewhat buffoonish figure (who can forget this gem or these incidents here and here). Beyond that, if you go back to his record since he was first elected to Congress in the early 1970s, you will find few if any members of Congress whose record on national-security matters can be judged to have been as consistently bad as Biden’s (see here).
Over the years, Mr. Biden has said a countless number of things that are silly and wrong. We can add what he said to USA Today to the list. And you can bet there will be plenty more to come.
Hmm. Well yes. It is also the case that businesses are run by human beings who are, in the nature of things, prone to greed, cowardice and corruption. It is also very frequently the case that those natural defects in human nature are exacerbated by government interferance and interaction with business. This problem tends to engulf both parties (e.g. Dems with Fannie and Freddie and the oil industry with the good ‘ol boys in Alaska), though the Dems much more so as THE party of Big Government. After all, why try to compete in the market place when you can help yourself by getting government to insure your profits, indemnify your risk and shower you with corporate welfare while strangling your competitors with regulation and taxation.
Having spent thousands of hours filing various incorporation documents in Delaware (all consistent with the law or at least a part of a fastidious effort to be scrupolously consistent with the law while preserving someting like an optimal business structure for a deal) I am constantly amazed to meet executives who prefer to maintain the corporate tax system as is (with the odd change beneficial to their specific business here and there) rather than support a simpler lower tax that would free them of all sorts of encumbrances but would require them to compete more vigarously in the marketplace.
Still, the message does make plenty of sense in the current environment although it would be nice if the culpability of the Dems in the Freddi and Fannie fiasco (over efforts to deal with the issue by Republicans) were brought a little more to the fore.
She sounds like a Democrat–which is the whole point.
Obama said pretty much the same thing–but after Palin.
Obama is now me-toing Palin. Amazing.
There is a danger here. We need to regulate some behavior (arguably) to prevent abuse. We need to also recognize that the cure can sometimes have unexpected (negative) consequences. Sarbanes Oxley comes to mind in driving certain security business activites off shore.
McCain Palin need to be ready for that. My suggestion–rather than trying to get McCain and Palin arguing this stuff like economists, indicate who the Secretary of Treasury under a McCain Administration would be. If they do not want to go that far, send out someone who they are relying on for economic advice. Mitt Romney? Steve Forbes? McCain can put these people front and center to argue these points. I think Mitt is still smarting from his race, but I suspect McCain could convince him to do what is best for the United States.
She got the best reaction from the crowd when she talked about her own experience and her family’s in everyday small business – a service station, a hardware store, commercial fishing, blue collar oil job. She herself is “Morning In America” just by showing up, but she also offers a kind of objective Perotism – she represents the kind of people who, sometimes quite literally, “get under the hood” for practical solutions, untouched by and unafraid of high finance and high politics. Our media elites have at best, and only rarely, even an abstract understanding of this very American appeal, which also puts the two Senators on the other ticket, who combine a complete lack of executive experience with a complete lack of business or other practical experience, and little or no real connection to the constituencies they as Democrats pretend to identify with. They have no recourse other than to try to look and sound the part of working class heroes and angry tribunes of the lower and middle classes. Their bona fides are borrowed largely from previous leaders and earlier eras. Given their own campaign’s indulgences in exaggerated scapegoating, unhinged messianism, even apocalypticism, they are also in a very weak position to attack as irresponsible a “scatter the moneychangers” message that may strike some conservatives as uncomfortably populist, but should strike many voters, independents in particular, as a breath of fresh air and common sense.
Actually with some of the consequences Sarbanes-Oxley were predictable at the time. Further, some deregulation, specifically enabling commercial banks to merge investment banks enabled today’s BofA, Merril buyout, thus ameliorating the crisis to some extent.
Yes some regulation is necessarry, and in particular the confidence such regulation might generate in the markets would justify the dead weight loss.
However, arguing the details on the stump would not only not be effecacious but, indeed, counterproductive.
CKMcleod@4
Exactly right. That is one of the many facets of her extraordinary appeal. Combined with her, by any reasonably standards, superb fiscal record in Alaska and her support of Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000) there is reason to hope that she will be able to sell a small government low tax message to blue collor workers (who would of course benefit from the policies but might be suscpicious of the message coming from a Mitt Romney or Steve Forbes) in due time.
In the meantime job 1 is keeping Barry, Harry, Nancy and team from crushing what’s left of this economy.
We know two taxes that John McCain, bane of “greedy Wall Street” will not be supporting:
1- A Windfall-Marriage Tax
2 – A Nine-House Tax. Possibly he would support a Ten-House Tax.
500 point drop on WS today.
http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/d/dd/Sarah_Palin_Bear_Crab.jpg
and they are all wrong. our regulatory system isn’t the problem, it’s the system that operates the regulatory system. BULLDOZE THE BELTWAY