Joe Knows The Unknowable

Here's another - perhaps the last - of the nice McCain ads mining the inexhaustible vein of Biden gaffery:

Yes, Darth Queeg does - or did - have an instant response team, but even they must be - or must have been - hard-pressed to keep up with Rogaine's insatiable babbling.

Wednesday it was Iraq:

“John is more than wrong — he is dangerously wrong. On a question so basic, so fundamental, so critical to our nation’s security, we can’t afford a commander in chief so divorced from reality and from America’s most basic national interests,” Biden said.

He spoke at the Cincinnati Museum Center, where President Bush made the case for attacking Iraq.

“Mark my words: If, God forbid, there is another major attack on America, it will not come from Iraq,” Biden said. “It will almost certainly come from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border — where the Bush-McCain approach let down our guard and let our enemies off the hook.

“And unlike John McCain — who opposed Barack Obama’s call to take out the high-level terrorist targets in Pakistan and called it ‘bombing our ally’ — we will not tolerate a terrorist sanctuary in Pakistan.”

Y'know what?  Joe's right, another major attack on American won't come from Iraq - because we didn't cut and run from there like the Democrats, most especially Joe's callow running mate, have been demanding for the past five years.  We went in the diametric opposite direction, increased the number of boots on Mesopotamian soil, went on the offensive against al Qaeda and Iran's Shiite proxie militias, and crushed them.  And you know who was in favor of that strategy?  John Sith McCain.

If Barack Hussein Obama had been president starting last year, we'd have been defeated by our own hand, Iraq would be an Iranian vassal under al Qaeda's control, and another major attack on America from there wouldn't be a matter of if, but a matter of time.

Beats me why Rogaine Messiah is bringing up Iraq again - even Lucifer has conceded that the Surge worked - but if the best they can do is years-stale hard-left boilerplate ("took our eye off the ball") and self-defeating arguments, I'm really looking forward to the foreign policy presidential debate - whenever it happens.

Alright, that wasn't really a gaffe, per se, just being ludicrously wrong, or [AHEM] "seriously out of touch," not just with reality but with recent history.  But THIS....:

Criticizing McCain for opposing negotiations with Iran, Biden said even the Bush Administration now favors such talks — which Obama has long supported.

“After seven years, in which our senior diplomatic personnel were not allowed to make a single contact with Iranians, the Bush Administration realized the absurdity of its own policy and sent our leading diplomat to Iran,” he said. “The Assistant Secretary of State as he went to Tehran, sat down at the instruction of the President of the United States.”

It sounds great for Obama and Biden that the President came around to something so close to their position on talks with Iran; trouble is, the event Biden described never actually happened.

In point of fact, the one “meeting” that has taken place was in Geneva, Switzerland, when Under Secretary of State William Burns sat in on a discussion between Iranian representatives and the other “P5 +1″ political directors involved in nuclear talks. The meeting, while a first, was not a negotiation; Burns was there merely as an observer, and had no formal role or talks with the Iranians.

So, point by point: Burns was not sent to Tehran; he did not go to Tehran; and there was no such instruction from the President.

In point of fact, Bush was following the Dem-cherished multilateral diplomatic approach, letting our allies grovel and make fools of themselves for the mullahs' amusement on our behalf.  Bush's Iran policy has ALWAYS been predicated on futile, foolish, useless, suicidal diplomacy rather than the decisive military action that is the only way Iran will be denied nuclear weapons.  It's Obama that is the wild-eyed "cowboy diplomat."

More to the point, though, is why Slow Joe keeps MSU-ing.  It's funny, really; not that the Democrat Party hasn't been littered with liars for decades, but it doesn't seem all that long ago that Bill Clinton established a new mold for truly pathological, congenital, compulsive dishonesty.  In 2000 Al Gore took that baton, but I figured that was mainly the product of his having understudied Mr. Bill for all those years.  But then John Kerry proved himself to be a hopeless serial fantasist with his mythological Vietnam backstory, and now here comes Joe Biden inventing fiction on the fly on any subject about which he happens to be gibbering.  And I really do think it's more than just a tendency to "depart from the text of his remarks".  One can only imagine how Rogaine Messiah's media zombies would be describing it if it were Sarah Palin knitting tall tales that didn't stand up to ten seconds' of scrutiny.

Barack Obama only gets excused from this rant because (1) he doesn't talk about his past and (2) he'll send his thugs to throw in jail anybody who does.

This last Biden blooper was such a whopper even the Washington Post couldn't abide it:

And now, as Paul Harvey used to intone, the rest of the story:

John McCain wants to drastically overhaul the health insurance system in order to encourage Americans to go out and buy their own health care plans rather than relying on employer-based plans. To achieve this, he plans to tax employer-provided health benefits and provide a $2,500 tax credit ($5,000 for families) toward the cost of health insurance.

By most independent calculations, the McCain plan will leave most taxpayers better off in strictly financial terms, at least until 2013. After 2013, the benefits will begin to diminish. By 2018, taxpayers in the top quintile will be slightly worse off, but middle-income taxpayers will either break even or be slightly ahead. According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, the McCain proposals will result in a net benefit of $1,241 to the average tax payer in 2009, $895 in 2013, and $386 in 2018.

“It is not fair to pull out just one part of the McCain proposal,” said Eric Toder, a TPC analyst. “It is a package. They are giving back more than they are taking away.” [emphasis added]

It is NOT, in other words, a "trillion dollar tax hike on the middle class."  Rather, it is, in essence, taking a non-cash fringe benefit and liquidating it into cash in order to reduce the third-party-payer nature of our health care/insurance system.  That's why most taxpayers will end up in the black on the deal.  It's even slightly "progressive" to boot.

It's particularly outrageous of any Democrat to attack any Republican for wanting to raise taxes given that that is PRECISELY what Rogaine Messiah plans to do, including to the middle class.  That'd be true even if the charge had any truth to it.

But you do have to admit that the nature of the McCain health insurance proposal does lend itself to such demogoguery.  It's very reminiscent, in fact, of Newt Gingrich's ambitious proposal to reform Medicare back in 1995, which, had it been implimented, would have by now reduced the federal government's unfunded entitlement liability exposure considerably, but which was so vulnerable to opposition distortion that it cost Bob Dole the presidency in 1996 and nearly aborted the "Republican revolution" in its crib.

"Attack dog" is the traditional role of the veep candidate.  Rotten, filthy, verbally incontinent prevaricator has now obviously been added to the Democrat version of that job description.  Which may be the lone sense in which Joe Biden qualifies as the man to hold Barry's warm piss bucket.

UPDATE: Admit it, you KNEW there would be one, didn't you?

Behold, Joe Weathervane is back on board the "clean coal" bandwagon:

Campaigning in Pennsylvania coal country on Thursday, the Democratic vice presidential nominee said the government should steer more money to clean coal — a term used to describe a variety of emerging technologies that burn coal for electricity without producing as much pollution.

“I am for clean coal,” he told The Associated Press following a speech in Wilkes-Barre…

The Delaware senator was working a rope line in Maumee, Ohio, on September 17 when a voter asserted that wind and solar energy were “flourishing” in Ohio and then asked Biden why he supported clean coal.

“We’re not supporting clean coal,” Biden replied, putting his hands on the woman’s shoulders. “Guess what? China’s building two every week, two dirty coal plants, and it’s polluting the United States. It’s causing people to die.”

Exit question: Did he depart from his prepared text again, did he return to his prepared text, or is he just deaf and only SOUND dumb?