Good column, but Saunders misses one big thing. Biden's greatest faux pas during his debate with Sarah Palin was the following, when he said: The U.S. and France got together and threw Hizbullah out of Lebanon (the reference was to 2006). Barack and I got up and insisted that NATO come into Lebanon to maintain the peace. Nobody listened to us. Now Hizbullah is back and is part of Lebanon's government.
Biden made up this whole story. It never happened. Neither the US, nor France, nor the US and France together, nor Israel, nor anyone else ever threw Hizbullah out of Lebanon. Hizbullah was installed there by Iran in the early 1980s and has been there ever since. There was never a question of NATO's coming in, in the midst a shooting war between Hizbullah and Israel (which Biden does not mention). The only thing that is true about this story is that Hizbullah is now part of the government.
Biden is no great foreign policy expert. He certainly doesn't know the Middle East very well. He suggested that Iraq be divided into three distinct countries. For that statement, a resolution was introduced in the Iraqi parliament declaring him persona non grata in the country.
At least the few remarks that Palin made about that part of the world were pretty much true.

Ma'am;....Presidential timber??? More like presidential toothpick....Thanks...Sweeney

Ma'am; Two points I would like to raise with you... One is that the politicos should Handle the press, and the other is whether the conservatives are conversant at all with the issues... The relationship with the politicians and the media should be essentially the same: to determine what is the truth, and what are we going to do about it... If the press is living in a fog, and the politicians own the fog machine the public are not going to be served. We cannot all pack up and ask our repesentatives why they did such and such or this or that... And as far as the conservatives go... I can believe they are voting their out of their conception of self interest. They can wave the flag, but it isn't fooling anyone except them. What do they know??? No one can be made to jump through their own sphincter faster than when battling what they hate. People vote their hate. They hate us. They hate all the people who say they are wrong, -that the republican party is wrong, Are the intellectuals wrong??? Are the republicans serving themselves, serving America, or serving humanity???. Are we still a paragon of virtue and a bastion of liberty??? Were we ever??? The republicans are living in the past, and they want us to join them there in that happy land... It was never happy, and people don't live there any more...It was not the librals who made the stock market crash, or who brought the country to war in Iraq without so much as a by your leave to the American people. We cannot afford your conservatives. We cannot endure your conservatives. We cannot educate your conservatives... Mrs. Palin can make them dance, but no one can make them smart... They vote their hate... They vote their emotions, and because they can be manipulated with their emotions they are dangerous, and fickle... I do not doubt that if you put the whole American people together that those who want to recapture a mythic American past that never was, would far out weigh all who want to get to a better America by facing a hazzardous future...But that is the only way we will capture the best of the past and the brightest hope of the future. The land of the brave must be intelligent and brave, and that leaves many republicans behind....Thanks...Sweeney