Is Joe Biden a Republican plant?

He really is the gift that keeps on giving. In case you haven't seen it yet, here is what he told some of those San Francisco donors at a fund raiser on Sunday.

"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

But not to worry, because Joe Biden who was wrong on the Cold War, wrong on the first Gulf War, voted for the invasion of Iraq - the opposition to which Obama bases all his claims on foreign policy, and wrong on the surge will be there to advise the novice who heads his ticket.

"I've forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know, so I'm not being falsely humble with you. I think I can be value added, but this guy has it," the Senate Foreign Relations chairman said of Obama. "This guy has it. But he's gonna need your help. Because I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, 'Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?' We're gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I'm asking you now, I'm asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point because you're going to have to reinforce us."

"There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, 'Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don't know about that decision'," Biden continued. "Because if you think the decision is sound when they're made, which I believe you will when they're made, they're not likely to be as popular as they are sound. Because if they're popular, they're probably not sound."

Just imagine if the Republicans had come out and said that electing Obama would guarantee some foreign nation or group was going to "generate" a crisis in order to test Obama just as John F. Kennedy was tested. Of course the Kennedy analogy doesn't give hope to to us since Kennedy's first year showed him giving insufficient military support and the go-ahead to the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation and meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. Khrushchev was so unimpressed with the new president that he went ahead with the Berlin Wall and placing missiles in Cuba.

And notice how Joe Biden is so sure that the decisions that a President Obama would make will not be popular because they'll be sound. Hmm, he seems to equate popular positions with unsound ones. George W. Bush could tell him all about this. So could Ronald Reagan. People forget how unpopular some of Reagan's moves on foreign and defense policy were at the time.

The new president is going to be facing a lot of 3 am phone calls. Vladimir Putin seems just the type to want to test the new president perhaps in the Ukraine. And what will Biden advise Obama to do if Iran starts testing the nuclear weapons they've been working on? Or if Syria moves militarily into Lebanon? Or if China makes a move on Taiwan? As Biden pointed out, there are a lot of possible scenarios for such a "generated" test. And Obama's other foreign policy judgments don't give confidence. He was wrong on the surge and has yet to admit it. His first reaction to the invasion of Georgia was to draw equivalence between the aggressor and the victim. Biden compares this "generated" crisis to what JFK faced but JFK's responses to those tests was weak. Biden's comparison implies that he anticipates that Obama's response would also be weak. Somehow, the thought of Barack Obama facing this future crisis with the advice of Joe Biden does not inspire confidence.

UPDATE: Even Dan Rather notes that the MSM is not following up on this as they would if Sarah Palin had said it. Heck, if she'd said it - they'd be all over themselves to accuse her of fearmongering and ugly, negative campaigning. And Rather, who should know about the impact of internet commentary, thinks that the internet interest in this may keep the story alive despite the MSM's general yawn.

UPDATE II: Scott Johnson had a good look back in May at that 1961 Kennedy-Khrushchev Vienna conference and what happens when an inexperienced leader ventures forth to meet with our nation's enemies.

BARACK OBAMA FIRST VOWED to meet unconditionally with the leaders of America's foremost enemies in the YouTube Democratic candidates' debate on July 23, 2007. Since then he has reaffirmed and expanded on the commitment in a variety of contexts, promoting such meetings as a sort of panacea for America's national security challenges. In making these pronouncements, Obama sounds like a precocious college undergraduate who finds himself granted a vision that has eluded elders whose befuddled reckoning has brought them to an impasse.

In Portland on May 18, Obama cited John F. Kennedy's 1961 summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna among the series of negotiations that led to America's triumph over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The Vienna summit, however, disproves Obama's assertion regarding the unvarying value of meetings between enemy heads of state about as decisively as any historical episode can refute a thesis. In addition to poor judgment, Obama has demonstrated that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

...."I never met a man like this," Kennedy subsequently commented to Time's Hugh Sidey. "[I] talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill 70 million people in ten minutes, and he just looked at me as if to say 'So what?'" In The Fifty-Year Wound, Cold War historian Derek Leebaert drily observes of Khrushchev in Vienna, "Having worked for Stalin had its uses."

Kennedy sought a brief final session with Khrushchev to clear the air regarding Berlin. In that final meeting at the Soviet embassy, however, Khrushchev bluntly told Kennedy, "It is up to the U.S. to decide whether there will be war or peace." Kennedy responded, "Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be war. It will be a cold winter." On this unhappy note the two leaders' only face-to-face meeting came to an end.

Immediately following the final session on June 4 Kennedy sat for a previously scheduled interview with New York Times columnist James Reston at the American embassy. Kennedy was reeling from his meetings with Khrushchev, famously describing the meetings as the "roughest thing in my life." Reston reported that Kennedy said just enough for Reston to conclude that Khrushchev "had studied the events of the Bay of Pigs" and that he had "decided that he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed." Kennedy said to Reston that Khrushchev had "just beat [the] hell out of me" and that he had presented Kennedy with a terrible problem: "If he thinks I'm inexperienced and have no
guts, until we remove those ideas we won't get anywhere with him. So we have to act."

....The following year brought the Cuban missile crisis, another sequel to Khrushchev's reading of Kennedy's weakness. Close as the Cuban missile crisis brought the two sides to war, however, it was perhaps not the most consequential effect of Khrushchev's reading of Kennedy's weakness. Persuaded that he needed further to demonstrate "fearlessness and backbone," in the words of William Manchester, Kennedy observed to Reston that the only place where the Communists were challenging the West in a shooting war was in Southeast Asia. Summarizing Kennedy's own evaluation of the aftermath of the Vienna conference in his 2003 biography of Kennedy, Robert Dallek writes that Kennedy "now needed to convince Khrushchev that he could not be pushed around, and the best place currently to make U.S. power credible seemed to be in Vietnam."

Read the whole thing. Obama's ignorance of history sometimes is chilling.