Obama and Biden, the Picture of Opportunism
August 25th, 2008 | by Ken |Consider this post a follow-up to: Obama is Anti-War! Kinda.
For those of you living under a rock (admittedly a relatively safe place during such bizarre times), or simply so consumed with Olympic fever that you block out all other information, Barack Obama has finally announced his running mate: Delaware Senator Joseph Biden.
While the “Mainstream Media” and the McCain campaign are having a ball criticizing Biden for his mouth and his uncanny ability to make up for Obama’s perceived weaknesses (I won’t post a link, do a youtube search or turn on Fox News if you want a discussion on why Americans needs a president that they are comfortable going to the pub with) what isn’t getting much attention by commentators is the fact that the pick of Biden further demonstrates Obama’s shameless opportunism on the issue of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Remember during the primary debates when Obama repeatedly bragged that he had opposed the Iraq War from the beginning? He made it an issue of contention between himself and the other candidates. And while his fatuous boasting (since Obama was not in the Senate when the war began and voted multiple times to fund it) was directed mostly toward front-runner Hillary Clinton, by implication he was also setting himself from Joe Biden. Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton, was a Senator (and a far more influential one) when HJ Res 114 came up for a vote. Lest anyone think that Biden was completely duped by the Bush administration into voting for a fraudulent war, consider that good ol’ Joe had been the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since 2001 (with a brief interruption). Even if Biden bought the lies, there was no reason that he should have since he had the power and the rank to find and publish more credible information before voting for the authorization for the use of force.
If you are voting for Obama because you believe that he represents Hope and Change, please reconsider your choice. At least in the arena of foreign policy Obama represents more of the same. His Vice-Presidential pick only further demonstrates that while he is willing to make a lot of racket and score a lot of political points by denouncing the Iraq War and the foreign policy decisions of George W. Bush, his actions speak differently. What he is in fact doing is furthering the political career somebody who has already demonstrated their susceptibility to neocon warmongering, somebody that, had Biden been a front-runner, would have been demeaned as “more of the same,” his favored attack against Clinton. Oh, and what was one of the main reasons that Obama (according to his own speech presenting Biden) picked the senior Senator from the little blue state of Delaware? His foreign policy experience. Newsflash for Obama and company: experience does not equal wisdom and ambition does not equal friendship.
update:
oops, my bad
graphic available for re-mixing under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Original photos found via Flickr users World Economic Forum, and pingnews (photo is Public Domain, source: Department of Defense).
