Saturday, July 30, 2011

A Bucket of Warm Piss

Don't you just love my free association post titles? Few things make me happier in life than an allusion. Also, apparently I'm coming up on the one year anniversary of this blog. If I can crank out somewhere around 16 posts in 25 days or so, I'll have 100 in my first year...which kind of seems vaguely like an accomplishment.

This post does have a point though...the Vice Presidency! And Joe Biden. I'm not really sure I have a good grasp of what public perception of Joe Biden is. I've heard some jokes at his expense, and run into one or two people who think that he's just not all that important. I guess he's a little hard to categorize as modern vice presidents go, he's neither the heir apparent a la Dan Quayle or Al Gore or the secret puppet master like Dick Cheney. But I love Joe Biden, Obama's choosing him as VP is one of my favorite things about Obama. Profiles of Joe Biden are one of my favorite kinds of articles to read...or at least they were until I hit the point where most of the information was stuff I already knew. And if you pay attention, there's really very little reason to believe that he's gathering dust in some forgotten office.

Paying attention exhibit one is this article. Did you know we still had diplomatic relations with Russia? The Middle East and China get all the news coverage these days, but it turns out Russia is still a very large country with lots of people and significant impact on world events. I enjoy the part where the Russian official pans the Republican party, even though I don't necessarily look to Russia in general to tell me how to think about things, but the really interesting part is the praise for Tom Donilon towards the end. Tom Donilon is one of the people that Joe Biden brought with him into the Obama administration. "Smart and attentive" pretty much sums up what I like about Joe Biden's political style. The thing that cemented my support for him initially back in the 2008 election was an op-ed he wrote during the crisis in Georgia. I can't find it online now, but he was the first person who really outlined the situation for me...not just taking ideological stances, but laying out what Russia's goals were and what our leverage in the area was. Since then, I've learned to count on Biden as someone who pays attention, who values trying to understand a situation and who believes that voters will want to understand it too. I think that's kind of his role in the administration as well. 

No comments:

Post a Comment