Random Thoughts

A heartbeat away…what a scary thought.

Every time Joe Biden opens his mouth during this presidential campaign, I find myself thinking “Why doesn’t Obama keep him away from microphones?”

Speaking in Seattle on Sunday, Biden said he could guarantee that the world will want to find out if Obama is up to the job, which he assured voters he is.

“Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking,” Biden said.

“Remember I said it standing here. if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. And he’s gonna have to make some really tough — I don’t know what the decision’s gonna be, but I promise you it will occur. As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it’s gonna happen,” Biden continued.

Oh, swell. There’s a motivation to vote for Obama. The international community won’t respect him, and we’ll get thrown into an international crisis as soon as he takes office. That’s exactly what we need, on top of Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran’s threats to Israel.

The Kennedy analogy is certainly not a positive one to draw. Kennedy’s summit meeting with Kruschev was “a move that would be recorded as one of the more self-destructive American actions of the cold war, and one that contributed to the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age.”

Ed Morrissey reminds us,

What resulted? The Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy wound up trading strategic intel and missile installations in western Asia in exchange for Soviet withdrawal of the nuclear missiles from Cuba. The entire Kennedy administration turned out to be a foreign-policy disaster that was only overlooked because of the tragic assassination of Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.

My late father, a commander in the US Navy, served in Naval Intelligence during the Cuban Missile crisis. Many years later he recounted to me some of his experiences. In some ways he found it worse than his service in World War II, calling it a “fiasco” that came within a razor’s edge of drawing a missile attack to US soil. Dad served under four different presidents during his time in uniform; Kennedy, he said, was the only one who “Really didn’t know what the heck he was doing as Commander in Chief.”

Dad was also a staunch conservative, with little regard for Kennedy’s presidency in general. I can only imagine what my father would say, were he alive to hear Biden tout Obama as the next JFK in the arena of international diplomacy.

Previously, I thought Biden’s frequent verbal gaffes just indicated he was a few McNuggets short of a Happy Meal:

But now I think he’s the worst kind of dolt, the sort whose arrogance actually leads him to believe he’s intelligent. The contents of his brain simply spill out of his mouth with no regard for how bizarre or damaging they might sound. And Colin Powell thinks Sarah Palin is a bad choice for VP? If she’s not capable of being POTUS, Joe Biden isn’t capable of being let out in public unattended. I can’t imagine him being in charge of anything, much less the Oval Office.

I think even Joe the plumber–whom the media certainly is scrutinizing as if he were running for office, instead of merely pointing out the lack of clothing on the emperor–would be more capable of taking the center seat than Biden ever could be.

Tangentally, but oh so fascinating in a LOTR Tolkien-geek kind of way, Rachel Lucas has a deliciously apt spin on this election, although the Amused Cynic disagrees with her casting. I totally agree with Amused about Powell, whose 11th hour endorsement of Obama smacks of self-serving political gutlessness.

Obama and the One Ring…I’m never going to look at that “O” logo in the same way.

And Rachel’s accompanying graphic made me spit Diet Coke on my monitor, in the best way.