Biden's Brussels Sprout
Biden's Brussels Sprout
Source: http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Alt/alt.politics.bush/2010−05/msg00344.html
• From: jose el fontanero
• Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 08:02:55 −0700 (PDT)
Biden's Brussels Sprout
Jonah Goldberg
Friday, May 28, 2010
"Joe Biden": With the exception of "broken teleprompter" these are the
scariest two words in the White House communications shop.
One advantage Biden has over Obama is he can always claim he was "just
being Joe" whenever he says something controversial. In this way,
Biden reminds me a bit of the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat, who would
say "nice" things in English and evil things in Arabic. The press
would largely ignore the Arabic and take him at his word in English.
Biden gets away with a similar technique, only it's all in English.
It's just that when he's "just being Joe," he gets a pass.
It would be one thing if all Biden did was offer the occasional
Washington gaffe (i.e., accidentally telling the truth), or if he
merely talked as if he learned history from Monty Python skits (as
when he claimed that FDR went on TV to reassure Americans after the
1929 stock market crash. FDR wasn't president. No one had TV). But
that's not how he rolls.
Earlier this month, Biden spoke to the European Parliament in
Brussels. "As you probably know, some American politicians and
American journalists refer to Washington, D.C., as the 'capital of the
free world.' But it seems to me that this great city, which boasts
1,000 years of history and which serves as the capital of Belgium, the
home of the European Union and the headquarters for NATO, this city
has its own legitimate claim to that title."
Now, as Biden said after the passage of ObamaCare, this is a big
(expletive deleted) deal. Sure, you can downgrade it as mere diplo−
flattery, but that's just the geopolitical equivalent of giving Biden
the same free pass he always gets.
Still, I'd give him a pass, too, if this was crazy Joe talking. We'd
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Biden's Brussels Sprout
all just roll our eyes if he came in there reciting Irish limericks in
Klingon and claiming that we can switch from fossil fuels to Grape
Nuts cereal.
But this wasn't Joe just being Joe. How do we know? Because these were
prepared remarks, and they fit perfectly with the White House's
approach to foreign policy.
In speeches around the world, Obama has offered apologies,
confessions, and indictments of his own country. Save for the
Afghanistan surge, Obama's foreign policy has pointed toward the idea
that America needs to downgrade its sense of exceptionalism. What
better way to do that than to concede the title of leader of the free
world, without a fight, to a Belgian backwater known for
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