President Obama set his Vice Presidential attack dog on the forty-seven GOP senators who dared send their March 9th letter to Iran’s leadership warning them any deal signed with Team Obama may be short-lived when a new president comes to office.
But Biden, like his boss, fails to do his homework before making outlandish statements or else chooses conveniently to overlook the facts.
Livid over the GOP letter, Biden proclaimed: “In thirty-six years in the United States Senate, I cannot recall another instance in which Senators wrote directly to advise another country.”
Directing his venom at the Senate’s Republican majority, Biden claimed the GOP letter was “expressly designed to undercut a sitting President in the midst of sensitive international negotiations…(an act) beneath the dignity of an institution I revere.”
Biden need not go back that far to find a senator who sent advice to a foreign power when similar “sensitive” negotiations were ongoing. Seven years back is far enough.
According to Pajamas Media columnist Michael Ledeen, in 2008, a Democratic senator sent a personal emissary to Tehran encouraging the mullahs not to sign an agreement with the outgoing Bush Administration as negotiations would take on a much friendlier tone following President Bush’s departure from office.
That senator was a presidential candidate at the time. His name was Barack Obama.
Perhaps Biden’s loophole in making his 36-year representation is that the message Senator Obama allegedly sent was not in written form. It was a verbal message delivered to Tehran’s leadership by Ambassador William G. Miller, who assured an enemy who was at war with us that a President Obama would be much more amicable to deal with.
While Biden suggests the GOP letter “undercut” Team Obama’s negotiations with Iran, what impact does he think presidential candidate Obama’s emissary had?
Undoubtedly, Miller’s visit at Senator Obama’s instruction explains why seven years late, we still have no nuclear agreement with Iran—and why the one forthcoming may be the “bad deal” of which we have been forewarned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
There is another reason why the GOP senators were acting responsibly by sending their letter.
President Obama has made clear he will use his executive order authority whenever necessary to achieve his desires, irrespective of the fact they may not align with those of Congress or the American people. There were murmurs that, knowing he will have a problem getting a bad deal with Iran approved by a Republican-controlled Senate constitutionally mandated to approve all such treaties, he might exercise his executive order authority to implement it.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest also got into the act of criticizing the GOP. He apparently takes his history lessons from the same book his boss does as, once again, history is painted with the incorrect brush.
Earnest claimed Republicans have “a long and sordid history” of choosing war over diplomacy. If one looks at all the armed conflicts our Nation has entered into, almost two-thirds of those occurred under Democratic presidents.
Ignoring presidential candidate Obama’s 2008 transgression and putting a holier-than-thou spin on the matter, Biden added, “Honorable people can disagree over policy. But this is no way to make America safer or stronger.”
Interestingly, neither will the anticipated nuclear deal that Team Obama is negotiating with Iran and may well impose upon us without the safeguard of obtaining the advice and consent of the Senate as our Constitution mandates.
Lt. Colonel James G. Zumwalt, USMC (Ret.), is a retired Marine infantry officer who served in the Vietnam war, the U.S. invasion of Panama and the first Gulf war. He is the author of “Bare Feet, Iron Will–Stories from the Other Side of Vietnam’s Battlefields,” “Living the Juche Lie: North Korea’s Kim Dynasty” and “Doomsday: Iran–The Clock is Ticking.” He frequently writes on foreign policy and defense issues.
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