Joe Biden

They've become almost like distant family over this long year-and-a-half campaign that still has another eight months to go -- the kind of family you pray won't actually show up at Christmas or Thanksgiving, but family nonetheless. Many have already left the 2008 race, and many more will be gone come Super Tuesday.

For those of us who follow politics, we know at least some of them by first name: Rudy, Barack, Dennis, Hitlery. And we know one of them by two first names, because that's how much Ron Paul loved Freedom.

Others, we didn't really get to know at all. They were like the fifth cousin who calls at 3:46 a.m. from the pay phone at Lincoln County Jail. It was best to just pretend it was a wrong number and go back to sleep.

Congratulations to the tiny fraction of Americans (mostly retirees in New Hampshire and Iowa) who have nothing better to do than pay attention to national politics. You people have already suffered through fourteen months of Campaign 2008, despite the fact that 2008 is still a few days in the future. And the actual election is still more than 10 months away.

Happy terrible new year!

When this finally ends and Ron Paul takes the oath of office at the new White House on the Moon after the space aliens steal Earth's gold, historians will want to know the "high points" of the year before the year of the 2008 campaign.

Unfortunately, there were no highlights. But all of the following really dumb crap happened, anyway ....

More new ads! The first, from Bill Richardson, airing in Iowa is a :30 ad titled "A Way Out." View it here:

Here's a round-up of the new ads in the race for the Democratic nomination for president. The first is an Iowa :30 second ad from the campaign of Chris Dodd, titled, "I am." It's a straight to camera pitch, view it here:

My colleagues have used a lot of space here at Political Machine showing you, the Good Reader, some of their favorite campaign videos. Up until just now I haven't had one. The Joe Biden video below is a classic. It's pretty obvious to me that he's not running for President, but for VP or Secretary of State - hell he doesn't even have any campaign gear!

The way that his fellow candidates feel about him, he's a shoo-in for any job with any administration - well, maybe not Rudy's. Check it out:

Watch this space for my interview with Cliff Schecter, writer, activist and troublemaker for Brave New Films!

We are now just 60 days from Iowa Caucuses and a year from the General Election. It's a full Sunday morning. Grab your remote! Here's the line-up:

ABC - This Week (George Stephanopoulos): with ex-U.S. Senator John Edwards (D-NC) to discuss his bid for the White House, additionally actress Ashely Judd on her new documentary about AIDS in India.

CBS - Face the Nation (Bob Schieffer): with U.S. Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) to discuss his bid for the White House, additionally Hillary Clinton's chief strategist Mark Penn.

CNN - Late Edition (Wolf Blitzer): with ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, additionally U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and U.S. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) to discuss their White House bids and U.S. Senators Arlen Spector (R-PA) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to discuss the confirmation of the U.S. Attorney General.

Fox - News Sunday (Chris Wallance): with former U.S. President George H.W. Bush.

NBC - Meet the Press (Tim Russert) with ex-U.S. Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) to discuss his bid for the White House.

Joe Biden runs into a bunch of school kids in the New Hampshire Statehouse who ask how the Iraq war started. He outlines how we got into Afghanistan to chase Bin Laden and how that was OK, then he moves to Iraq:

"But the president, I think, he got a little confused," he continued. "I think he thought the folks in another country, way, way far away, far from here, it's also far from Afghanistan, called Iraq. He said, 'The guy in Iraq he helped bin Laden do bad things to us,' and he didn't. He wasn't a good guy, but he didn't help. So we used that kind of as an excuse to attack Iraq."

Stop! Rewind! Iraq was based on bin Laden connections, not WMDs? What way, way far away universe did this Joe Biden teleport in from? Or is this the same Joe Biden, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who voted to authorize the Iraq war and said on its eve, "One thing is clear: These weapons must be must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power"?

Last week the U.S. Senate passed a resolution that could one day lead to the partition of Iraq into three ethnic zones--Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the middle, Shiites in the south.

So, is this the long lost viable political solution to the complicated mess that the Iraqi occupation has become?

Judging by the strong allergic reaction to the non-binding measure from the U.S. Embassy in Iraq that quickly followed, one can likely rule out the support of the Bush Administration. The Embassy warned of "extraordinary suffering and bloodshed" if the plan were implemented.

Today, as part of the debate over the 2008 Defense Appropriations bill, the Senate approved a non-binding resolution calling for the partitioning of Iraq into three sectarian regions. The resolution was sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) and passed on a vote of 75-23.

The idea is based upon the belief that Iraq's disparate factions will never agree to a meaningful power sharing arrangement that would provide for a strong, centralized, national unity government. The theory is that once the Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds are given their own federalized regions to control, there will be more incentive for them to compromise over larger issues like oil revenue sharing. It's an interesting theory, and one worth looking at. The only question is this: What is the United States Senate doing voting on the political future of Iraq?