Yup, you heard it here first.
At least Palin already has a kid over there, so she doesn't look like a complete asshole.
Biden Touts Support for Troops as His Son Prepares for Iraq
September 22, 2008 5:39 PM
ABC News' Matthew Jaffe Reports: With his eldest son Beau about to be deployed to Iraq, Sen. Joe Biden insisted he, rather than Sen. Barack Obama, address the National Guard Association Monday, delivering an emotional speech criticizing Sen. John McCain, who had spoken to the Guard the day before, for his foreign policy judgment, campaign tactics, and commitment to the troops.
“Now I know some of you wonder why the Republicans sent the first team, and the Democrats sent the second team,” Biden told the Guard's annual conference in Baltimore. “Well, let me tell you why. There's few things vice-presidents and vice-presidential nominees get to do, you can only call a card once. I told Barack, I'm coming. I'm coming.”
“I’m also here today as a father of a guardsman,” he continued. “My son Beau is proud to wear the uniform, and proud to answer the call to serve.”
At times fiery and angry, the animated Biden grew quieter and paused momentarily when describing the impact on families when a soldier's life is lost.
“Eight-hundred and seventy members of the Guard and Reserve are among the fallen angels, among the fallen angels in this war,” he said as he recalled flying back from Baghdad on military planes with coffins aboard. “All I can think about when I fly back with those caskets - all of which come to my state, the state of Delaware, the Dover mortuary - all I can think about is the parents, husbands and wives, children waiting at the other end.”
The senator touted his work to provide the troops with $20 billion worth of newer, stronger military vehicles known as MRAPs, dubbing himself, “the bastard at the family picnic.”
“It wasn’t until I stood on the floor of the United States Senate and said I’m gonna be the bastard at the family picnic here, I’m gonna stand here - not a joke - I’m gonna stand here, I’m gonna stand here until we appropriate the money to build these vehicles.”
The Delaware lawmaker accused McCain of employing “the politics of division” in the Republican nominee’s address to the Guard Sunday, when he claimed that behind Obama's positions lay the ambition to be president.
“We can question each other’s judgment, that’s what elections are all about, but we have to stop questioning each other’s motives and each other’s patriotism. You know, whether we’re Democrats, whether we’re Democrats or Republicans or Independents, we all share a profound desire to do right by America. We all, we all put country first...When John and I send our sons to war, they don’t wear a Republican flag or a Democratic flag. They wear the American flag.”
Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, also ripped McCain for an Iraq policy where the definition of "victory" means “you’re there for a lifetime.”
"What’s John’s definition, God love him? No Iranian influence. Did John happen to notice when we have 140,000 American forces in Iraq that the president of Iraq invites Ahmadinejad from Tehran to Baghdad and then embraces him and kisses him on both cheeks? Ladies and gentlemen, read history! So if you go by John’s definition of what constitutes success and victory, hang on, you’re there for a lifetime.”
Biden urged the focus not be on Iraq, but rather, “that superhighway of terror that exists between Afghanistan and Pakistan” where Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda are based.
“If God forbid that attack comes, it will come from the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Biden warned. “It will not come from Baghdad."
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
