Remember the Biden Plan?

Way back in 2006, Joe Biden said we should carve up Iraq into three parts — Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd.

That’s what’s happening on the ground right now.  If Maliki can hold Baghdad and the Shia provinces in the south (a huge if), how is he going to dislodge ISIS from the Sunni areas, how is he going to dislodge the Kurds from Kirkuk, which they’ve long claimed as their “capital,” and now completely control.

The Biden plan is being implemented de facto, if not de iure.

On his 90th birthday, let’s remember that George H. W. Bush kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, but refused to kick him out of Baghdad.  Bush knew Saddam was a monster, but he was a bulwark against Iran who ran a secular regime with a strong, educated middle class.  Bush 41 knew that we were better off keeping Saddam, so long as that meant keeping him from expanding his borders and from gassing the Kurds.

What’s happening right this minute is the fault of Bush 43 for going in, not of Obama for getting out.

Is He Kidding?

Joe Biden has invited a bunch of top New Hampshire Dems to an inauguration party at his house on Sunday.

Is he kidding?  He would be 74 on Inauguration Day 2016.

Neither party wants to nominate someone who can’t serve two terms, and no one wants a president who would be 82 at the end of his second term.

The job ages you.  Who wants to age even faster in their late 70’s or early 80’s?

Pure Genius!

Someone working for President Obama deserves an enormous raise, and a big hug and kiss.  How’s this for the best framing ever?

Speaking to the UAW in Toledo, Ohio, Joe Biden proclaimed, “Stated simply, we’re about promoting the private sector.  They’re about protecting the privileged sector.”  Italics added.

How incredibly clever is this?  The GOP nominee will of course try to frame the election as the Democrats are for the public sector, while we’re for the private sector.

As Republicans slog it out in their primaries, the Obama campaign uses its jump on the the general to disavow the public sector, claim the private sector, and pin the privileged sector on their opponents.

This is brilliant.  Eat your heart out, Karl Rove.

Obama’s Lonely Bin Laden Decision

I have expressed my concern that Mitt lacks the guts and temperament to make tough decisions, such as the one to do the bin Laden raid.

Joe Biden now says that he advised the President “don’t go” on bin Laden and that when the President asked everyone on his national security staff (Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, National Security Adviser, etc.) what he should do, only Leon Panetta (then head of the CIA) said he should go.

With so many top advisers expressing doubts, it would have been easy for the President to take their advice and not do the raid.  It took guts for him to overlook all the reservations his trusted, experienced senior people were expressing.

I think if Mitt had been in that room, he would have hidden behind the qualms of the others and made a “business” decision to forego the raid.  I see him as operating more by consensus than by boldness, as basically risk averse and more interested in avoiding downsides than aggressively pursuing upsides.

We the people don’t get to make these decisions, we delegate them to our Commander in Chief.  President Obama has my proxy.

Will Cain’s Invoking Clarence Thomas Help Anita Hill?

Herman “You want a job, right?” Cain has been trying to wrap himself in the mantle of Clarence Thomas, whose false outrage was one of the better performances the Senate has ever seen.  But this re-opening of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy may backfire not just against Cain, but against Thomas as well, with Hill emerging as the winner.  The wheels of justice grind slowly….

Jane Meyer, who co-authored the book Strange Justice defending Hill, has a post “Cain and Thomas” up at newyorker.com.  She points out that allegations of sexual harassment are most damning when there is a pattern, which requires more than one accuser.  That’s why it was important to keep others from supporting Hill, to leave her twisting in the wind, uncorroborated, “nutty and slutty.”  Three other women were ready to back Hill up — Angela Wright, Sukari Harnett, and Rose Jourdain.

Meyer writes:  “No persuasive reason has ever been given for why these women should have been denied a chance to testify.  In the intervening twenty years…two former Senate aides, both Democrats, have admitted privately that their bosses knew that Thomas would have been unlikely to survive multiple accusers.  Facing this moment of decision, they flinched.”

No one flinched more shamefully than Joe Biden, who was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee at the time.

To the extent Cain forces us to re-examine the Thomas nomination in the light of what’s been revealed since, it’s an embarrassment for Thomas and Biden, and vindication for Hill.

The Real High-Tech Lynching

As comparisons are made between Herman Cain and Clarence Thomas, including the bizarre interview of Cain by Thomas’ wife Ginni, she who favors foam Statue-of-Liberty crowns as part of her wardrobe, we should remember who really was the victim of a high-tech lynching — Anita Hill.

She was called “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” and the meme took hold, even though it was a baseless smear.  The right succeeded because Joe Biden cut her off at the knees by cancelling other witnesses who were going to corroborate her testimony.  He was intimidated by the Republicans and terrified of having them turn their full wrath on him and destroy him politically.  So he tossed them Hill, they swallowed her up, and went away sated.

David Brock, Anita Hill’s main accuser, who wrote both a vicious article about her in The American Spectator and a book called The Real Anita Hill, later repented and became a liberal.  He wrote another book, Blinded by the Right:  The Conscience of an Ex–Conservative, apologized to Hill, and founded Media Matters for America, dedicating himself to calling out right-wing lies.

Clarence Thomas never should have been confirmed.  Thank you, Joe Biden, for a wimpy and crappy job.  You may be a fan of JFK, but you are no profile in courage.