Remember Joe Biden's Fearless Leadership in the Iraq War Debate? Me Neither.
Over at National Review Online, Gene Healy tears into Sen. Joe Biden's (D-Del.) sorry record of constitutional shirking in the run-up to the Iraq War:
After voting for the resolution, prominent members of Congress insisted they hadn't voted to use force.
[…]
Biden's post-hoc rationalizations for his vote follow the same pattern. "If I had known this administration would be so incompetent," he told interviewer Charlie Rose in 2004, "I never would have given them the authority to try to avoid the war," which is an interesting way to describe a resolution titled "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq." In fact, Biden is at least as complicit in the decision to go to war as is Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Biden joined with McCain to defeat an amendment offered by Senator Carl Levin that would have forced President Bush to get U.N. Security Council approval before launching the invasion.
It's still hard to get a firm answer from Biden as to whether he supported the invasion and occupation of a country that represented no serious threat to the United States. But he insists that he was firmly against botching the job. Well . . . who wasn't?
In a more perfect world, Biden (and the rest of his Democratic accomplices) would experience some blowback over that. Alas.