Opinion: Joe Biden update: No Nobel Peace Prize, no Joe

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It’s been a tough month for Vice President Joe Biden so far.

As most people now know, Biden did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. Nor the ones for physics, chemistry, plagiarism or talking.

This on the heels of the failed bid to bring the 2016 Olympics to Wilmington, Del., despite the local railroad station there being rehabilitated by economic stimulus funds overseen by the most important Amtrak passenger to ever use that building.

Everyone knows that Biden has been busting his chops getting the nation’s economy back on track to lose only a few hundred-thousand jobs per month through countless numbers of closed-to-press meetings of the secret sort that used to drive Democratic members of Congress absolutely crazy when the sessions involved the devilish Dick Cheney, who was not a Democratic vice president.

Biden was reportedly the key undercover operative in getting Arlen Specter to acknowledge his Democratic Party allegiance publicly. The president is counting on Biden to get every Democratic candidate elected next month and next year. The VP will go to something like 22 states and 48 political events between March and next month, talking up a partisan storm at fundraiser after fundraiser.

And everyone knows that busy, busy Biden, who remembers the politically turbulent Vietnam War days and severe Democratic Party strife over the U.S. military commitment there (back when Obama was in junior high), is quietly pulling all....

...the behind-the-scene strings to arrange for a new Afghan military strategy that will appear on the surface to be a strong commitment to the fight against terrorism there.

President Obama has called that increasingly unpopular eight-year struggle a ‘war of necessity.’ But then as a new senator, Obama also called President Bush‘s Iraq troop surge a big mistake. And we all know how that turned out.

Everyone knows that Biden is the first beardless Democratic vice president of this century to not win the Nobel Peace Prize. How disappointing.

And now everyone including Biden knows that in the Obama administration’s first two weeks in office last winter, back when they said closing Guantanamo and fixing the economy were the most important issues and sent Delaware Joe out to all those shovel-ready projects, Obama’s nomination for the Nobel Prize was being quietly prepared and submitted. So he could win it in his sleep in early October.

Of course, no one knows exactly what Biden is up to because of his less-than-elaborate public schedules.

And congressional Republicans have obviously decided to give the longtime senator a pass on the secretive schedules within what was promised to be the most transparent administration in American history. But for anyone to even suggest that Biden would go off by himself for three days to cool off after such abuse is patently ridiculous. He’s probably celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving today.

Here’s how the complete official White House schedule opaquely described Biden’s latest three-day weekend:

Well, that certainly narrows it down.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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