Joe Biden gets the memo

Today, the A.P. reported as follows:

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said he believes the American people are frustrated by the Bush administration's failure to articulate a clear strategy for winning in Iraq. Benchmarks and timetables for a withdrawal are needed to gauge progress and limit U.S. casualties, he said.

“If I had known the president was going to be this incompetent in his administration, I would not have given him the authority” to go to war, said Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Sounds like someone has been reading Big Mitch’s blog.

Back on Nov. 8, 2005, I asked, Why is it so hard for Democrats to say this? I predicted that the question, “Knowing what you know now, would you vote for the war in Iraq?” would be “a recurrent question from reporters who take their cue from the Republican disinformation machine.”

I also offered a simple answer for use by any Senator who might need it.

Let’s get something straight right now. I didn’t vote for this war when I voted to authorize the President to use force.

Knowing what I know now, I never would have trusted him. What we know now is that he was cherry picking the intelligence, and then twisting it to make his case. That’s what we know now and I suspect we will find out much worse when the full story comes out. So far, we know that the White House undertook a vicious campaign to ruin anyone who disagreed with it, and when they crossed the line into treason, the response was to lie to the FBI, lie to the Grand Jury and otherwise obstruct justice.

We gave the President authority to use force at a time when we were trying to convey to Saddam Hussein that there was no alternative but to cooperate and produce the evidence of dismantling his WMD regime. But we did not expect the President to go into Iraq without adequate troops, without an exit strategy, and without a plan for the peace. If we had known that he would run the war like the incompetent bungler he has proved to be, if we had known that he would use the war as an opportunity for profiteering by his cronies, if we had known that it would be a distraction from the war on terror, and that because he would fail to listen to military planners the country would become a breeding ground for terrorists, well, don’t be ridiculous, of course we wouldn’t have voted to trust the President.

You go, Joe!

... and tell 'em Big Mitch sent ya!