Personal Aside: O, What a Friend We Have in Joe! …and John!

Joe.

Either Joe Biden IS mentally deranged from those two prior aneurisms… or he is a Republican mole…or he has been struck by a thunderbolt, tossed from his chariot on the way to Damascus and has been electrified into telling the truth. In any case, here is the October Surprise, delivered gratis by not just a Democrat but the Democratic vice presidential nominee, lifted from the Senate chamber and moved to Barack Obama’s side by nature of his expertise in foreign affairs basis his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee.

As the world either now knows or will shortly, this is what Biden said—captured on video tape—in a fund-raising speech delivered Sunday in Seattle:

“Mark my words, it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did Jack Kennedy. The world is looking. 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 [Obama]. And he’s gonna have to make some realluy tough—I don’t know what the decision’s gonna be but I promise yhou it will occur. As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it’s gonna happen.”

The remarks were the second of this type Biden delivered over the weekend. At a fund-raiser in San Francisco, he said Obama’s challengers will “find out this guy’s got steel in his spine” when he is tested.

By saying these things, Biden moved the focus of the campaign from the economy where Barack Obama wishes it to remain to national security and presidential testing in times of crisis where John McCain is dominant.

There is nothing inaccurate with Biden’s statement. But as a so-called “student of history,” he should remember than the last time a young, 40-something president was tested in this way, he was John F. Kennedy—and the testing left JFK, the nation and the Free World at a disadvantage.

In 1960, Kennedy, a backbench U.S. Senator…but still with much more experience than Obama has compiled up to now… had won a very narrow race against Vice President Richard Nixon who claimed that Kennedy did not have the essential gravitas in foreign policy experience to be president. Nikita Khrushchev saw Kennedy flinch on his first national security outing when only a few weeks after inauguration, the young president signaled a go-ahead with the April, 1961 Bay of Pigs landing but lost his nerve and canceled air cover for the invaders, causing a debacle that humiliated the U. S. before the world. Later that Spring, JFK met with the Soviet leader in Berlin.

He later told James Reston of “The New York Times” and Hugh Sidey of “Time” that Khrushchev had decided he—Kennedy—was weak, untested and irresolute as result of the flubbed Bay of Pigs landing. Accordingly Khrushchev launched the building of the Berlin Wall which blocked east Germans from fleeing the Communist zone to the West. Khrushchev followed up by sending missiles to Cuba, necessitating Kennedy to go eyeball to eyeball with him, endangering the peace of the entire world. The only way Kennedy evaded further humiliation was to agree secretly via his brother Robert to withdraw U. S. missiles from Turkey—about which the U.S. was kept in the dark.

Kennedy told Reston that Khrushchev had so misgauged America’s failure of will that America would have to double its military involvement in Vietnam to shore up its apparent resolve. Thus this young, largely untested president by failing the test, (1) sacrificed hundreds of lives and much U.S. treasure in the abortive Cuban landing; (2) precipitated Khrushchev’s building of the Berlin Wall which was a feature of the Cold War until 1989 and (3) indefinitely enlarged America’s participation in Vietnam which cost over 40,000 lives.

So-called “student of history” Biden has given a remarkable object lesson to Americans by causing them to concentrate on the signal attribute of John McCain. The tough old buzzard…steeled in experience in war and peace… will not likely be misjudged by either terrorists or hostile world leaders. It is sure that Biden knows what he’s talking about—that the world will want to test Barack Obama. If anything, Obama is as unsure and uncertain, is as wobbly as it is possible to be in his lack of experience. At least John Kennedy had had a few years in the House and two terms in the Senate plus valuable experience overseas as the son of an ambassador who wrote as a college thesis the reasons for Britain’s weakness which led to Hitler’s aggression in his book “Why England Slept.”

David Axelrod worked throughout the night trying to squeeze this lemon handed him by Biden into lemonade. His solution: try to indicate that McCain’s intemperate nature could blow up a war. Nice try, David but no cigar. You’ll earn your fat media fee this week, for sure. Assuredly, you’ll have ample help from the cross-eyed media but it may not be sufficient.

John.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) regaled a crowd yesterday by saying that like all other presidential candidates, Obama and McCain have been asked whether they prefer boxers or briefs. Obama chose boxers but McCain answered: Depends.

Another highpoint for the liberal tittering class by the windsurfing expert.

Incidentally stock in H.J. Heinz rose 14% yesterday which prompted the Bostonian, the richest Senator basis his marriage to Teresa, widow of the late John Heinz of the catsup foretune, to confess romantically that he’s fallen in love with her all over again.