The battle of the Senators Joe

Joe Biden responds to Joe Lieberman.

A preview of a vice presidential debate, perhaps??

Comments

[Marty West]

<3 Biden

[JT]

Lamont responded as well.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ned-lamont/the-kennedy-torch_b_103198.html

[CORNHUSKERS 94 95 & 97]

I will vote for McCain if Obama picks Hillary to run with...she is a vile human and disgust me like no other politician

[Angrier and Angrier]

Joe Lieberman evokes FDR yet fails to remember "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Unfortunately, some in this country have succumbed to fear to the point where they allow their moral and ethical compasses to be compromised and their judgment to be negated.

Lieberman is one of those people. He is a pathetic shadow of his former self.

[Aaron]

I thought about responding to the Lieberman article when it came up in the previous thread, but really was just too lazy. Biden gets paid to do this stuff, and this is a good reply from him. He deals nicely with the "talking to Iran" issue, but since he doesn't grapple much with Lieberman's broader theme about the Democratic party, I'll add a few words.

Lieberman is making an extremely strong claim, grading the Democratic party on foreign policy over the past 60+ years and reaching a conclusion which amounts to: FDR good, Truman good, JKF good, Clinton-Gore good (how convenient for Lieberman)... LBJ bad, Carter bad. Evidence in support of this claim? A handful of rhetoric ("bear any burden", etc.) and a grand total of three actual policies. Clinton intervened in the Balkans, Gore pledged to increase the defense budget and supported missile defense. I guess we're just supposed to fill in the blanks for everything that happened before 1995. I mean, I know he has limited space, but good grief. This isn't even the Cliff's Notes version of an argument. It's the Cliff's Notes with all but a few pages torn out.

Such a broadly made but thinly argued claim calls for a book-length reply, not a blog comment. I want to focus on one point, and ask the following question of the blog. Isn't it particularly odd for Lieberman to be rallying JFK to the defense of his (Lieberman's) preferred, aggressively militaristic vision of foreign policy? Didn't Kennedy's finest foreign policy moments involve showing caution and restraint in the face of pressure to act aggressively? And didn't his worst moments come from recklessly overestimating America's capability to use force to shape the world to our liking? This is largely a question of historical interpretation, and I'm just curious what you guys think.

[David K.]

Brilliant article by Senator Biden, there really isn't much else to say.

[Joe Mama]

Didn't Kennedy's finest foreign policy moments involve showing caution and restraint in the face of pressure to act aggressively? And didn't his worst moments come from recklessly overestimating America's capability to use force to shape the world to our liking?

I take Aaron's reference to "showing caution and restraint in the face of pressure to act aggressively" to mean the Cuban missile crisis, and "recklessly overestimating America's capability to use force to shape the world to our liking" to mean the Bay of Pigs.

However, if one traces the roots of Kennedy's "finest foreign policy moment" referenced above (which I heartily agree with, BTW), you'll find that it was born out of Kennedy's ill-advised meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna early on in his presidency, where Kennedy showed himself to be every bit the young and inexperienced president that Khrushchev thought he could push around. Vienna is generally viewed as a disaster for Kennedy, and led almost directly to Cuba.

Interestingly, Kennedy himself said during the 1960 debates that he agreed with Nixon that he wouldn't meet unconditionally with Khrushchev. Had he followed his own advice, there might never have been a need for his "finest foreign policy moment" to begin with.

[Aaron]

So, granting your point about Vienna, I think we can say that the lessons to be learned from the Kennedy administration cut partially in favor of and partially against Lieberman's vision of foreign policy. On the other hand, as a role model for the type of policy Lieberman seems to favor, Kennedy now seems like an even more ill-suited example, right?

[Joe Mama]

That's a fair assessment.

[Aaron]

Cool, we hashed that point out. By my count, that leaves us with only 1,863 to go before we can submit our jointly authored White Paper to the McCain and Obama* campaigns.

*Sorry Hillary...