Joe Biden's alternate universe

The Wall Street Journal picks up on the long list of things that Joe Biden said in Thursday's debate that are just not so. This is the one that bothered me the most because it is so far from what has happened in Lebanon.

Start with Lebanon, where Mr. Biden asserted that "When we kicked -- along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, 'Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know -- if you don't, Hezbollah will control it.' Now what's happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel."

The U.S. never kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, and no one else has either. Perhaps Mr. Biden meant to say Syria, except that the U.S. also didn't do that. The Lebanese ousted Syria's military in 2005. As for NATO, Messrs. Biden and Obama may have proposed sending alliance troops in, but if they did that was also a fantasy. The U.S. has had all it can handle trying to convince NATO countries to deploy to Afghanistan.

Watching the roundtable discussions on the Sunday news shows, it was so frustrating to hear all the supposed experts talking about how Palin was all folksy charm without much substance and Joe Biden was a knowledgeable and genial older statesman who resisted the temptation to seem condescending to her. Why not go into some of his larger goofs that belie his reputation as being so knowledgeable about foreign policy.

Where I would most fault Sarah Palin's lack of knowledge of foreign affairs is that she didn't know enough to contradict Biden's claim about kicking Hezbollah out of Lebanon or that it is just a fantasy to think that we could get NATO to be a credible force there.