Leo Linbeck III:
“What do you do when confronted with an opponent who will tell outright falsehoods in order to gain advantage? Biden, in the VP debate, made a large number of outright misrepresentations. But he made them with such confidence that the average viewer was easily duped (I have to admit that I didn’t realize how many he made until after the fact). ”
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One consequence of nominating Sarah Palin as our Vice Presidential candidate is that we have a candidate who does not know enough about major issues to challenge such false claims about the basic facts immediately during the debate. If Biden had said that the capital of Lebanon is Cairo, Palin would not have challenged him.

I am dismayed that McCain and Palin have let Obama get away scot-free with Obama’s claim that he was right to oppose our Iraq War from the beginning. It now has become the common wisdom that McCain was right about the Surge but Obama was right about the Iraq War as a whole. If that remains the common wisdom, then McCain will lose and Obama will win this election.

McCain and Palin should be hammering Biden repeatedly for opposing our intervention to defend Kuwait from Iraq in 1990. Why did Palin oppose our military intervention in that war? What did and does Obama think about our military intervention in that war? Was the USA supposed to allow an aggressive, expansionist Iraq ruled by the tyrant Saddam Hussein threaten and invade its neighbors?

And then why did Biden change his position and support our invasion of Iraq in 2003? Was their any reason besides political expedience, because his 1990 position had turned out to be so disasterously unpopular? And why did Obama say just a couple years ago that there was practically no difference between Obama and Bush on the Iraq War?

The public needs to be reminded that the Democrat Party is essentially a pacifist party. The Democrats are reluctant to apply military force to any problem anywhere at any time. The Democrats will reduce our Defense Budget significantly. The Democrats will turn over the military security of the USA and of the whole world to the United Nations. The Democrats will watch passively as tyrannical regimes threaten, invade and destroy moderate regimes in the world’s most important oil-producing region. The Democrats might talk tough, but the whole world knows that the Democrats are soft and that the USA can be flouted whenever the US President is a Democratic.

But all McCain is saying is that he was right and Obama was wrong about the Surge. Obama’s response every time is that Obama showed better judgement in opposing the war from the begining, and McCain and Palin both give Obama a free pass on that response every time.