Biden Boomlet Is Strictly Insider Game For Now

As political pundits try to rev up excitement over a potential Biden presidential campaign, most in the public should save time by focusing on more pressing matters.

Vice President Joe Biden is an establishment corporate Democrat whose entry into the 2016 would not appreciably change anything except to provide Democrats an alternative for Hillary Clinton in case her campaign implodes.

Barring some as-yet unknown crisis in health, however, her track record provides no indication that she would ever withdraw until the end of the primary season no matter what the competitive field or accusations thrown at her.

Moreover, campaign pundits typically over-praise a candidate pondering a race and then lower the boom soon after entry with harshly negative reporting.

Biden has provided through the decades plenty of cause for criticism. So, he knows better than most that a third run for the presidency is likely to bring out the skeletons, including viciously unfair treatments in the past.

Biden, for example, has been deeply involved in foreign policy decisions that have created vast tactical, strategic and moral reverses, with a few exceptions. In a White House photo Aug. 30, 2013, for example, Biden sits at the president’s far right on one of their many high-level meetings in the Situation Room regarding the U.S.-led attempt to overthrow Syria’s government. Almost never reported is that U.S. smuggling of arms and fighters from Libya to Syria with CIA and State Department assistance is part of the hidden history of that region.

Clinton has also help lead this decision-making. One of its tenets is that that United States leaders have the right to order bombings and government overthrow almost anywhere in the world so long as humanitarian or democratic reasons are cited.

There is little room for distinction between Clinton and Biden regarding the carnage. One exception is that Clinton left the Obama administration in January 2013 before many of the worst results of the Bush-Obama foreign policy became so obvious in terms of costs to the United States and the world. As Democratic front runner, however, has borne the full brunt of partisan attacks over the deaths of four U.S. personnel in Benghazi and claims she violated State Department rules by using a private email server.

The pattern of recent expensive, illegal and inhuman foreign policy horrors includes the U.S.-led war against Libya and the ongoing carnage in Syria, the Ukraine, and Yemen. Particularly shameful has been the war profiteering by Biden’s son Hunter in the Ukraine. The younger Biden was appointed as a director in a major energy company following the U.S.-led coup against Ukraine’s government in February 2014.

State Department personnel were caught on tape plotting the coup and a role for the vice president in February 2014. So, Hunter Biden’s  appointment and that of a former top fund-raiser for current Secretary of State John Kerry convey the appearance of a payoff to American leaders to help support the coup government with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

On the pirated tape of coup planners, the speakers included U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Victoria Nuland (shown in an official photo). She is a prominent neo-con holdover from the Bush administration. Her arrogant language described Biden as if he were a mere stooge for the neo-cons controlling U.S. policy. Details: U.S. diplomat apologizes for profane remarks on E.U. in leaked phone call.

More generally, this editor’s take is based on politics watching beginning with coverage in Chicago of the iconic 1968 Democratic National Convention. Like next year’s election, the 1968 campaign was for an election with no incumbent running. In 1968, incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson resigned in March because of opposition to his Vietnam War policies. New York Senator and presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated under still-mysterious circumstances in June on the same evening he won the California Democratic primary.

Our more recent research has included attendance at Clinton’s last two major events during her 2008 presidential campaign, at the Mayflower Hotel and National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Each event involved her concessions to Obama in June when the numbers simply did not stack up for her continuance. However, her loyalists did make a dramatic but essentially hopeless effort later in the summer to fight the Obama steam-roller by securing the seating of her delegates from Florida and Michigan at the Democratic National Convention.