Say It Ain't So Joe!

There was plenty to go over on the debate.  The two things I noticed was that a) Joe was so full of BS you almost couldn't stay caught up between when he switched from the truth to a lie to the truth again and b) Joe was desperately trying to make himself more important than he actually is or will be while simultaneously insisting that Palin as the VP will have no duties but to grace the White House as a grecian statue in the Rose Garden.  

Which is right where he went into another BS moment.  Of course, Joe thought he could get away with it because he thinks most of the American people don't know jack anyway so they won't be able to exactly figure out when he started lying and when he left off.  Now that is not change.  That is definitely "politics as usual". 

There were so many things Joe said that it was hard to pick just a few, but my favorites, this being a military blog and all, were:

1)  The United States and France kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon and then tried to get an international peace keeping mission going, but,now look, Hezbollah is back in power.

Well, the obvious first piece of baloney is that Hezbollah was never, I repeat, never kicked out of Lebanon.  Syria withdrew from Lebanon, but left their powerful proxies behind, sending them loads of weapons to help kick off the 2006 squabble and eventually do armed resistance.  Second, it was President Bush who made that happen.  Joe was somewhere in the bowels of Congress telling stories about his kitchen table. 

Third, there was no way that an International peace-keeping force was going in there because a) there was no war (repeat that to yourself, when Syria left, there was no war and democracy was in its spring), b) everybody remembers the very ugly 1983 intervention (an intervention, I believe, Joe was confusing with more recent events; we certainly had driven somebody out of Lebanon at the time, but it ended badly), and c) the UN, say it with me, the UN that Obama believes will cure everything could not and would not authorize such an event and no one, not even Joe Blow in his wildest fantasies, was making that happen.

I might add that Hezbollah has always had power in Lebanon as one of the largest majorities serving one of the largest single ethno-religious polities in that nation.  That's without talking about their extremely long held 1/2 of the nation with their entrenched, shadow government.

Pardon me, is this guy the foreign relations expert?  You know how war will start in an Obama administration?  It won't be because BO invaded Pakistan, it will be because Joe Biden is on cable network news, flashing across the world, saying something incredibly stupid about India and the funny turban's Sikhs wear and how he'd go to war for that alone...just joking...God, luv ya...everybody makes fun of the Sikhs...come on

2) General something or other says that a surge will not work in Afghanistan, but Obama promises to send more troops and spend more money on reconstruction.  Oh, but the surge in Iraq doesn't matter because we shouldn't have been there in the first place.  We should have been in Afghanistan with a 100,000 troops making the same horrific mistakes and watching thousands of men die there because, you know, Afghanistan is once where Obama..oops...Osama lived and it is much more sacred and consecrated ground to die on if you actually have to fight terrorists.  Ipso facto, dying in Iraq is in vain. 

Um...Joe...your son is deploying to...oh, hell, never mind...

Of course, the major malfunctions are multitudinous.  Someone should explain to Joe that, indeed, sending more troops to Afghanistan, spending more time and money on "reconstruction" is, well, exactly "the surge".  Maybe ol' Joe heard about this thing called "counter-insurgency"?  Numbers matter, but only in context of where you put them and what they do.  Invading Pakistan over the Hindu Killer Kush?  Not exactly "counter-insurgency" and likely to make Obama's meager "nuclear non-proliferation" look like the horse after the barn door was shut.  Long gone.

And, it's odds-on that Obama would be pushing the generals to put even more troops in there to do something, whatever, so long as it looks like he's taking it seriously, even though the generals are likely concerned about the tenuous supply line out of Pakistan or flying somewhere into the few flat places in Afghanistan before being trucked or helicoptered (yes, Joe, helicopters) into difficult terrain with limited access and extremely dangerous probabilities of IEDs becoming even more prevalent and killing a lot of our troops.

For McCain, I think his years on the Senate Armed Forces Committee, along with years as a POW cherishing the few Red Cross packages he received, probably understands that you do what your logistics allows you to do.  Whispering numbers into the wind doesn't change that fact.  I believe that makes McCain Sun Tzu and Obama/Biden that German tanker guy, ol' what's his name, who ran out of gas and then had his burnt out tanks handed back to him by Patton.  Who said, I believe, "Been there, done that in some past life."

At least Joe didn't regale us with another big BS story about being "forced down" by millions of Al Qaeda bullets and RPGs, surrounded by angry natives with pitchforks and nearly interrogated until he finally had to admit that he plagiarized some other guy's story.

In the end, it was simple: Joe tried to BS his way through most of it by siting never before, and never again, heard of facts, names and anecdotes.

Oh, and apparently, Obama will be setting up a second desk in the Oval Office where Joe will spend most of his time, right there, right beside Obama, holding his hand and helping him make all those hard decisions about whether to bomb Israel...er...Iraq...um...Iran or some place that starts with an "I" full of crazy people.  Hey, maybe they'll just bomb the Sikhs!?.  If necessary.  First, they'll invite the grand Ayatollah Khamenei for tea and crumpets to try to work this whole "nuclear bomb" thingy out.

All in a day's work for Super Joe.  Right before he goes home to sit around the kitchen table with his wife and one grown son who will be on house arrest.  But first, apparently, he'll have to tuck Obama in so the scary Cheney Monster doesn't jump out of the closet and get him.

Really, Joe Biden is to foreign policy what Glenn Reynolds is to puppies: a bloody blender.