You know some people say that that's not Joe Biden's own hair. I say that's a damnable lie. You pay $6,000 for something, you own it, that's what I say. (Apologies to Burt Reynold.)
Posted on 07/01/2006 10:18:29 PM PDT by West Coast Conservative
After more than 30 years in the United States Senate and nearly 20 years after his first try for his party’s Presidential nomination, Joseph Biden has no doubts about making another run for the White House.
“I’m in,” the Delaware Democrat said Friday as he began a five-day visit to the first-in-the-nation primary state.
“I know I’m supposed to hedge, but I’m in.”
Biden dropped out of the 1988 nomination race amid allegations of plagiarism. He then suffered a cerebral aneurysm virtually on the eve of the New Hampshire primary.
He recalls being given a 30 percent chance of surviving.
“I’m lucky,” he said. “I’m a respecter of fate. But barring something like that happening to me or my family, I am in.”
Biden said he won’t be surprised if, as the fourth longest-serving member of the Senate, he’s labeled the “consummate insider.”
But, he said, the label doesn’t really apply.
Biden, 63, realizes that among the hard left activists in his party, his stance on the Iraq war — to stay and fight until the job is done — is unpopular. But he is asking for their trust that a “neo-isolationist” foreign policy is the worst possible alternative for the country at this point in history.
Regarding the Iraq war, terrorism, and overall foreign policy, Biden considers himself a “muscular Democrat.”
In an interview at the Bedford Village Inn, Biden said the Bush administration’s policy has made the United States more vulnerable to terrorism, not less.
The ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden said his “bluntness” and the fact that he shuns the Washington “political rounds” and “embassy rounds” will show voters he is not typical of the Capitol Hill genre.
“But the very thing that may prevent me from being viewed as the consummate insider is the very thing that may get me in trouble — and that is a tendency to say what I think,” he said.
While he is employing consultants, such as long-time friend former Democratic national chairman David Wilhelm, who managed Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, Biden said, “I’ll have my counsel be my own counsel.”
While admitting to being “agnostic” on what he considers less important issues, Biden said, “There are certain core things I’m not prepared to back off on,” including, he said, a belief that Sens. John Kerry and Russell Feingold’s calls to withdraw troops from Iraq by a specified date in mid-2007 is a mistake.
Biden said 2008 may also be “the one year maybe in the better part of a century when it’s much better to be a senator than a governor. I don’t think the country is looking for on-the-job training.”
He said four of the seven Presidents he has served with were former governors, and each “took at least two years to figure out what their foreign policy was. And I think the public is looking for someone who seems to have strength and the substance, the intelligence, to implement what he or she says."
Biden said his Senate experience “is the thing that’s given me the confidence to believe I’m the best qualified person to be President. I’m wrong about a lot of things, but I haven’t been very wrong about the foreign policy side of the equation.”
A key missing component of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, Biden said, is the ability to “project to the world what your values are, and what you value.”
“We need a much, much, much more robust doctrine of public diplomacy,” said Biden, including programs not unlike the cold war’s Radio Free Europe.
He said Donald Rumsfeld should resign as defense secretary in the wake of the Haditha killings to show the world “we take responsibility for mistakes and we’re ready to change.”
The United States must remain the world’s most powerful force by expanding the military and moving from reliance on high-tech weapons “to having a force large enough to be able to deal with the exigencies of the world.”
But even as a “muscular Democrat,” he said, “the rules of engagement are very different for me.
“It’s a matter of having to rebuild alliances by rebuilding faith in our country. Other countries don’t doubt our physical might. They doubt our judgment. That’s where we’ve been so badly damaged.”
Biden said a U.S. Supreme Court decision last week outlawing military tribunals for detainees suspected of terrorism was valuable.
“When we depart from the rule of law, does it help us or hurt us in our overall fight and objective, to take on terror?” said Biden. “It hurts us, and the court’s decision is positive and will help us in the international community.”
Biden said he proposed opening discussions with Iran immediately after 9/11, when thousands marched in the streets to show empathy for the United States. “There was an opportunity because the Iranians were worried about terror turning on themselves.”
He said Bush refused to negotiate.
Biden said Bush correctly handled Afghanistan, “but then the hubris began. We defeated the Taliban almost too quickly, and (the administration) immediately turned their attention away from solidifying Afghanistan, nailing the Taliban and bin Laden, and turning to this new adventure (in Iraq).
“In retrospect, it’s clear to me they had no intention of doing anything other than going to war in Iraq,” Biden said. “This is going to (go) down as the single most tragic foreign policy mistake of this century.”
Biden said that if the United States had not gone to Iraq, Saddam Hussein, “left unfettered,” would have gained access to a nuclear weapon in five to seven years.
But if “we had kept the no-fly zone going, inspections, and if the Kurds had continued building a serious state that was growing, you would have continued to put pressure on Saddam, and I think we would have eventually brought Saddam down in a process where his own military would have decided he was too much of an impediment for them.”
Biden said that with Saddam at least contained, “we could have been able to keep the rest of the world with us and focused on really doing what the President promised us. By now, we would have crushed the Taliban and would have had a much better chance of having eradicated the bulk of al-Qaida and bin Laden.”
Now, Iranian leaders "like things just the way they are," said Biden. "We’re tied down and there is no full-blown civil war.
"The irony of all ironies is that Tehran is much more secure today because Saddam’s gone and the Taliban is gone," he said. "They ought to be sending us a 'thank you' note.
"It did not have to be this bad."
The DNC is beyond hope--and luckily, it seems, most Americans know it.
The more lunatics, the merrier....wonder when Sharpton is going to announce another shot at the title?
The ACLU website has a section where you can write in and let them know of unconstitutional violations they can turn their mighty - cough - brainpower onto. I think they're fishing for things like crosses in public cemeteries, schoolchildren praying for help with tests, and things like that, but I have repeatedly suggested to them that they go after the 22nd Amendment (two terms for a president) as unconstitutional, so that we can elect Pres. Bush again, and again, and again. Oddly, I never hear back from them. ;)
OMG, this is too funny.
Why is it that all the Democrat candidates seem to be running against Bush when he is not running. Totally weird!
You know some people say that that's not Joe Biden's own hair. I say that's a damnable lie. You pay $6,000 for something, you own it, that's what I say. (Apologies to Burt Reynold.)
You know some people say that that's not Joe Biden's own hair. I say that's a damnable lie. You pay $6,000 for something, you own it, that's what I say. (Apologies to Burt Reynold.)
I've been reading it........you're right it is funny!!!
Biden knows he can't win. He just wants all the attention it will get him. The man loves to be in the lime light.
What is even more surprising is that these guys continued to get elected! Kennedy, Kerry, Murray (my "senator" - arg), Cantwell (my other "senator," although she might lose the next time around), Boxer, Feinstein - the list goes on and on. Shows that people do not know the issues when they vote.
and the Democratic nominee is someone who is 104 and on several types of life support. Going for that sympathy vote but the VP spot is Satan herself
A Bevy of Biodegradable Bloviating Blowhards Boring Us Beastly with Brief Bouts of Insanity
He's a raving left wing puke. Ever notice how these stories try to convince people the favored and fawned over Dem isn't a total kook?
He's too dishonest and holds party above country.
A student asks him, iirc, "Is your hair real?". The Duke
answers "It's real, all right. It's not mine, but it's real."
"In my house, being raised with a sister and three brothers, there was an absolute - it was a nuclear sanction, if under any circumstances, for any reason, no matter how justified, even self-defense - if you ever touched your sister, not figuratively, literally....And I have the bruises to prove it. I mean that sincerely. I am not exaggerating when I say that."
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