I agree. Biden wins at least "dis-honorable mention" for remarks made in his address to the Council on Foreign Relaations on 10/22/01, as quoted on the FR thread Unenlightened selfish interest: Hewitt slams Sen. Dems for dissing America at time of greatest need:
Here is the relevent excerpt:
RP: Roland Paul(?), Senator, I concur with everybody else in commending you on your comments, and anyone who's heard you before would certainly not be surprised at how good they were. I would return to a question you answered earlier, and you said as long ... the bombing, every day it goes on, the harder it may be for us to do something in the past(?). What do you see as the situation if we don't defeat the Taliban in the next four weeks, and winter sets in in Afghanistan?What a maroon! Why not give up ALL of our military advantage, and just "duke it out" with our bare hands? Because we want to WIN!
JB: Again, I'm not a military man. I think the American public and the Islamic world is fully prepared for us to take as long as we need to take, if it is action that is mano-a-mano. If it's us on the ground going against other forces on the ground. The part that I think flies in the face of and plays into every stereotypical criticism of us is we're this high tech bully that thinks from the air we can do whatever we want to do, and it builds the case for those who want to make the case against us that all we're doing is indiscriminately bombing innocents, which is not the truth. Some innocents are indiscriminately bombed, but that is not the truth. I think the American public is prepared for a long siege. I think the American public is prepared for America losses. I think the American public is prepared, and the President must continue to remind them to be prepared, for American body bags coming home. There is no way that you can in fact go after and root out Olkaida and/or Bin Laden without folks on the ground, in caves, risking and losing their lives. And I believe that the tolerance for that in the Islamic world is significant ... exponentially higher than it is for us bombing.
That's a generic point I wish to make. I am not qualified enough to tell you, although I can tell you what the military guys have said to me, this is not 1948. This is 2001, I'm not at all they're correct, and our ability to wage conflict in the winter, in parts of this region, is within our control, I don't know enough to vouch for that or not, but I do think it clearly makes it more difficulty, and the weather window is closing, as opposed to the tolerance window for our behavior, in my view. Thank you all very, very much. (Applause)
M: Thank you. That was wonderful.