The Romney campaign has released an ad titled “Fiscal Discipline” to seize on Vice President Joe Biden’s laughing at Paul Ryan during Thursday’s debate.
It makes the point that President Obama and the Democrats are not serious about fixing the nation’s fiscal crisis by panning in on the Vice President grinning and laughing while Ryan details what the nation is up against.
“We can’t keep spending and borrowing like this,” Ryan is shown saying during the debate. “We can’t keep spending money we don’t have.”
Meanwhile Biden is shown resembling the Jack Nicholson’s interpretation of the Joker from 1989’s “Batman.”
The ad goes on to contrast Biden with Mitt Romney, who the ad says is a leader who is uniquely qualified to fix these problems
But the Vice President’s son, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, defended his father’s debate performance this morning during his appearance on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos.
“I’m happy to defend my dad. I don’t think he needs any defensiveness. Any time the other side – Karl Rove or folks on the far right – are going after my father for smiling too much, you know that’s a victory,” the younger Biden said. “My father spoke clearly to the American people about the facts, and you saw him do that for 90 minutes straight.”
Biden charged that Ryan was ignorant on foreign policy and lacked the knowledge one might want a future Vice President to have, pointing to Afghanistan and Libya as examples.
Ryan was unwilling to say that a Romney-Ryan administration would keep the 2014 timetable that the President has set for an Afghanistan pullout, Biden said.
“These are folks that seem to be more interested in kind of pounding their chest to make the neoconservatives who advise them proud than they are about being serious about foreign policy and protecting our national interests around the world,” Biden said. “This is a tragedy when we lose an ambassador and three other personnel.”
“This is not a moment in time where we should be politicizing these issues… And the idea that Romney and Ryan are suggesting that the President of the United States doesn’t take seriously the security of our diplomats and Foreign Service officers around the world I find absolutely outrageous.”
Yet Beau Biden’s comments fly in the face of history because Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 election against Jimmy Carter happened in large part because of concerns with the incumbent’s handling of the Iranian hostage crisis.
The Carter administration sought to placate the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian mullahs following the fall of the shah, not unlike the policies pursued by the Obama administration in response to the Arab Spring.
Yet in both cases, the liberal American administrations’ policies were greeted by mayhem on the part of the Islamist revolutionaries in Iran in 1979 and in Libya and Egypt in 2012.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVdz1Neuuzg&w=560&h=315]
