Am I dreaming, or did Joe Biden just blow another presidential bid with that big yap of his? I feel like I’ve been transported back to 1987, when the old media knockout machine first kicked into high gear. First it was Gary Hart, presumptive front-runner, derailed because of what — some kind of heterosexual liaison with an adult woman? God, no! He was out of there, his morals not up to the high standard set by the ersatz Hollywood cowboy then ensconced in the White House — a man who had 
cavorted with the likes of Errol Flynn back in the day, for chrissake. Then Biden got caught cribbing British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock, and he was out. Would that work today? Not as well as Biden’s clumsily phrased comment that seemed to suggest Obama is cleaner and more palatable to, well, white people. The insufferable NPR Morning Edition team brought up Obama’s comment that he did not take the remark personally, about which one of them commented, well, why should he? It wasn’t about him. Ummm… well, yeah, it was about him, if the comment was a reference to “blackness” in general.
Anyway, that’s Joe Biden. Less newsworthy, apparently, is his contention (which he shares with nearly all of his fellow Democratic presidential contenders) that the Iraqis need to, in essence, get their shit together. This is positioning for our eventual exit from Iraq. It’s the same exit strategy we applied to the Vietnam War — blame the victims, as though what we did to them was something we did for them. That’s the Vilsack line, as well, and of course Hillary is all about “benchmarks” for the Iraqi government, etc. Meanwhile on the other side of the aisle, the “hang tough” Republicans (all safely beyond fighting age, one might notice) have added “benchmarks” to their resolution of support for Bush’s escalation, though the rhetoric is still designed to set their opponents up for blame when (not if) this “strategy” doesn’t work. And when it doesn’t work, you can bet it will be because people just slightly to the left of them doubted it, and not because it is an utterly bankrupt policy.
Yes indeed, you can see the outlines of a “knife in the back” explanation for our failure in Iraq when the war is finally over. Again, this is Vietnam redux. Those antiwar protesters, press critics, and wishy-washy liberals emboldened the enemy, undermined our troops, compromised the mission, stabbed the president in the back, etc. Hey, it worked great for Nixon… and for Hitler, come to think of it. Mark my words — this catastrophe will be blamed upon the very people who counseled most strongly against it in the first place. We will be lumped together with everyone from Osama and the crew to those French “surrender monkeys,” whose Gaullist president Jacques Chirac recently had the temerity to suggest that an Iranian nuclear weapon would not be the disaster the U.S. makes it out to be, since its use would result in Teheran’s utter and immediate annihilation by the enormous Israeli and U.S. nuclear arsenals. (The Morning Edition crew seemed utterly flabbergasted at this remark, as if they’d never heard anything so outlandish as the concept of nuclear deterrence that we’ve lived by since the start of the Cold War.)
So by all means, oppose this stupid war. But don’t for one minute suppose that you’ll be thanked for it later. As my mom always told me, no good deed goes unpunished.
