When Will Joe Biden Become Fair Game?

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted September 7, 2006.

"He is an impediment in this effort."
-- Sen. Joe Biden, on Donald Rumsfeld's Iraq war legacy

An impediment. That's kind of a funny way to describe the architect of the Iraq war, isn't it?

Put a mythical six chimpanzees to work on a mythical six typewriters and one of them might eventually type out Hamlet, but I feel fairly confident that a billion years could pass before any healthy primate would make it even halfway through the sentence Donald Rumsfeld impeded the Iraq war effort. Yet there was Joe Biden, saying it on live television last week.

The Democrats, God bless them, came out with yet another calculated media attack last week, following up Hillary Clinton's August ambush of Don Rumsfeld with the introduction of a resolution calling for the Defense Secretary's resignation.

From almost the moment that Rumsfeld gave a speech early last week comparing Bush's Iraq war critics to pre-WWII Nazi "appeasers," the Democrats started whaling away at him, filling the front pages of big dailies across the country with "Top Dems Blast Rumsfeld" headlines.

Almost the whole roster of prominent Democrats was in on the effort, with everyone from John Edwards to Chuck Schumer to Nancy Pelosi to Ike Skelton to Jack Reed seemingly reading from the same gloatingly self-righteous "Rumsfeld is a real dick" script.

It was one of those groan-out-loud coordinated media-sandbag jobs, now standard procedure in American politics, where the various politicians separately make exactly the same pre-prepared "jokes" in their respective "extemporaneous" public remarks, delivering their message with all the wit and spontaneity of a Speak N' Spell:

Pelosi on Rumsfeld: "If Mr. Rumsfeld is so concerned with comparisons to World War II, he should explain why our troops have now been fighting in Iraq longer than it took our forces to defeat the Nazis in Europe."

Biden: "The most significant comparison with World War II is that we soon will have been in Iraq as long as World War II, with much less success."

Yuk, yuk. In any case, this anti-Rumsfeld broadside is a classic political canard, a perfect expression of everything the modern Democratic party stands for. Politically, it makes perfect sense, as Rumsfeld is much less popular even than Bush; this is a figure whose approval ratings were down in the thirties two years ago, back when Bush was still capable of winning a national election.

The attack will work, because so many voters out there will see in it a reflection of their own animosity towards the hoary Defense Secretary, not thinking about the real underlying meaning of the Democrats' campaign. Because what Rumsfeld actually represents to the Democrats is a means of attacking the Republicans on the Iraq issue without having to explain their own vote in support of the invasion.

Essentially the Democrats will call Rumsfeld a bunch of names for the sound bite, and then, in the fine print, state their real "objections" to Rumsfeld's record, which will amount to something like the fact that he invaded Iraq on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday, used too few troops to needlessly destroy Iraq's national infrastructure, failed to distribute free milk and cookies to the Mahdi army, etc.

A typical comment will be one like Chuck Schumer's of last week: "There are growing doubts about how competently he's conducted the war." (How do you competently invade the wrong country?) And so the Democrats once again will make an effort to sound antiwar out of one side of their mouths, and pro-war out the other side; they will then close their eyes and hope that they pick up 16 seats before anyone notices. If that ain't leadership, what is?

I can take this stuff coming from most of the Democrats, but it's awfully hard to listen to this crap from Joe Biden. Actually, listening to Joe Biden sound self-righteous about anything makes me want to puke my guts out. I don't know what it is about him.

Maybe it's that creepy poof of blow-dried gray pubic fuzz he has now covering up that dime-store plug job on his head. Maybe it's the fact that he's been ponderously wondering aloud about his chances for the White House for 18 straight years, his painfully obvious hard-on for power straining against his suit-slacks, ever since a plagiarism scandal and an aneurysm knocked him out of his first run. Maybe it's that his idea of outflanking the Republican Party is outspending them on the War on Drugs.

Or maybe it's just that Biden, more than almost anyone in American public life, will do or say anything that he thinks will secure him even the most temporary electoral advantage. Two years ago, back when the Iraq war was still a winner politically, Biden spent a lot of his time slamming other Democrats for not being On Board enough with the war effort, and he even went out of his way to bitch out Democrats for criticizing Ronald Reagan.

As he told the New Yorker, "Everybody knew 'Reagan is dangerous,' remember? He talked about freedom, so what do we do? We say it's a bad speech, dangerous speech," Biden said, adding that Democrats were "making the same mistakes again."

Biden at the time also complained that Republicans were getting away with taking credit for the idea of a pre-emptive war, when it was really a Democratic idea. "What is so transformational in the last four years is that these assholes who wouldn't give President Clinton the authority to use force" have now become, Biden said, moral interventionists. He added: "Give me a fucking break."

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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