Where’s Joe Biden?

28 March 2011 |permalink | email article

On Sunday’s opinion programs I thought the most stunning comment came on the NBC’s Chris Matthews Show when Howard Fineman, now a senior Huffington Post editor and reporter, opined that Joe Biden’s invisibility is “probably a good sign that he was against the Libyan operation.” Elizabeth Bumiller, the national affairs correspondent with the New York Times concurred, noting that the vice president was also against Afghanistan too.

Thomas E. Ricks, a special military correspondent for the Washington Post, appeared along with Bob Woodard and Ted Koppel on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” got little face time. But as a senior fellow with the bipartisan Center for New American Policy, he posted a significant blog Friday on foreignpolicy.com.

“If President Obama had not intervened in Libya a week ago, we would indeed probably be looking at Benghazi or Srebrenica – except his Cairo speech would have given him an additional load of responsibility, of seeming to bear false promises.

As for the military grumbling now about the need for strategic clarity, Ricks wrote “it reminds him of early in World War II, when Generals George Marshall and Eisenhower could not see the need to land in North Africa., but FDR did, both to keep the Russians in the war and to convey to America that we were fighting the Germans.”

Quotable

“Weapons speak to the wise, but in general they need interpreters.” – Pindar, Olympian Odes

“When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns…to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” – George Orwell in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.”

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