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Biden to Democrats: Don’t Apologize in 2014

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Photo Credit: AP/Susan WalshVice President Joe Biden on Thursday told Democrats to stop apologizing for their policies and go on offense as party leaders try to overcome pessimism about prospects for the November election.

At a Democratic National Committee gathering, Biden said he and President Barack Obama have an obligation to raise money and campaign for the party’s candidates. He said he has signed up to participate in more than 120 races and that Obama has given him permission to participate in every campaign where he can be helpful.

“I am so tired about hearing about the demise of the Democratic Party. Give me a break,” Biden said. “My central message to you is look: I think we should not apologize for a single thing.”

In his pep talk to state chairmen, the vice president tried to portray the party as starting on solid ground as campaigning gears up.

“There is no Republican Party,” Biden said, accusing the GOP of masquerading as conservative while actually espousing anti-government views that he said Americans reject.

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Biden: I Would Run Against Hillary (+video)

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Photo Credit: Chip SomodevillaVice President Biden made it clear Tuesday he’s open to running against Hillary Clinton in a 2016 Democratic presidential primary.

Speaking on ABC’s “The View,” Biden pushed back when co-host Barbara Walters claimed he had said he would not enter the next race for the White House if the former secretary of State did.

“No, I haven’t” said that, Biden told Walters. He added later that “whether [Clinton] runs or not will not affect my decision.”

The 2016 questions came as Biden sought to promote ObamaCare’s marketplaces with the show’s heavily female audience.

The White House is urging mothers to tell their kids to sign up for health plans before March 31, when open enrollment ends for 2014.

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Biden: ‘There Isn’t a Republican Party’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: APVice President Joe Biden, speaking to the House Democratic Issues Conference in Cambridge, Md., on Friday, said, “There isn’t a Republican Party,” claiming that there wasn’t one Republican “you could sit across the table from,” make a deal and know that it was done.

“There isn’t a Republican Party. I wish there were. I wish there was a Republican Party. I wish there was one person you could sit across the table from, make a deal, make a compromise, and know when you got up from that table it was done. That’s what political parties – that’s what Nancy’s able to do. That’s what the president’s able to commit to,” Biden said.

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Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates Offers Harsh Critique of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in New Book

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Photo Credit: DoD Photo

Photo Credit: DoD Photo

Gates Slams Biden in Memoir, Reveals He Nearly Quit

By Zeke J Miller.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has harsh words for Vice President Joe Biden’s foreign policy judgement in his soon-to-be-released memoir.

According to the New York Times, which obtained an early copy of the memoir, Gates calls Biden “a man of integrity,” but questions his record. “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” Gates writes, according to the Times.

Gates, the only high-level holdover from the Bush administration to the President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, reveals he nearly quit his post in September 2009 while Obama reviewed his Afghanistan strategy. According to the Times, Gates writes he was “deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation — from the top down — of the uncertainties and unpredictability of war…I came closer to resigning that day than at any other time in my tenure, though no one knew it.”

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Robert Gates, former defense secretary, offers harsh critique of Obama’s leadership in ‘Duty’

By Bob Woodward.

In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”

Obama, after months of contentious discussion with Gates and other top advisers, deployed 30,000 more troops in a final push to stabilize Afghanistan before a phased withdrawal beginning in mid-2011. “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” Gates writes.

As a candidate, Obama had made plain his opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion while embracing the Afghanistan war as a necessary response to the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, requiring even more military resources to succeed. In Gates’s highly emotional account, Obama remains uncomfortable with the inherited wars and distrustful of the military that is providing him options. Their different worldviews produced a rift that, at least for Gates, became personally wounding and impossible to repair.

In a statement Tuesday evening, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said Obama “deeply appreciates Bob Gates’ service as Secretary of Defense, and his lifetime of service to our country.”

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Book Details Obama Aides’ Talks About Replacing Biden on 2012 Ticket

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Photo Credit: Martin H. SimonPresident Obama’s top aides secretly considered replacing Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the 2012 ticket, undertaking extensive focus-group sessions and polling in late 2011 when Mr. Obama’s re-election outlook appeared uncertain.

The aides concluded that despite Mrs. Clinton’s popularity, the move would not offer a significant enough political boost to Mr. Obama to justify such a radical move, according to a newly published account of the 2012 race.

The idea of replacing Mr. Biden with Mrs. Clinton had long been rumored, but the journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, in their new book, “Double Down,” provide a detailed description of the effort inside the senior circle of Obama advisers. It was pushed by the chief of staff at the time, William M. Daley, despite the close personal rapport Mr. Daley had developed with Mr. Biden, a fellow Irish Catholic and veteran of Washington politics.

“When the research came back near the end of the year, it suggested that adding Clinton to the ticket wouldn’t materially improve Obama’s odds,” the authors write in their sequel to “Game Change,” which chronicled the 2008 campaign. “Biden had dodged a bullet he never saw coming — and never would know anything about, if the Obamans could keep a secret.”

In a phone interview on Thursday, Mr. Daley acknowledged that he had wanted to research what the move would have meant for Mr. Obama, whose popularity, in the fall of 2011, was at its lowest in his presidency to date. He called it simply “due diligence.”

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John McCain: Let Joe Biden Out of Witness Protection

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesJoe Biden to the rescue!

A top Senate Republican called for President Obama to get the long absent Vice President Joe Biden “out of the witness protection program” to restart stalled talks to end the government shutdown and stop a US credit default.

“I hope the president will become engaged. Maybe we need to get Joe Biden out of the witness protection program,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Biden has been the chief White House negotiator in previous high-stakes budget talks, including the deal that averted the 2011 “fiscal cliff.”

McCain said the vice president’s mysterious absence this time underscored the uncompromising position of the White House, which has refused to negotiate with House Republicans.

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Obama, Biden, Kerry, Hagel, Clinton Backed ‘Reformer’ Assad During Bush Administration

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Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

Kerry’s cozy dinner with Syria’s ‘Hitler’: Secretary of State and the man he likened to German dictator are pictured dining with their wives at Damascus restaurant before civil war broke out

By Anthony Bond and David Martosko.

An astonishing photograph of John Kerry having a cozy and intimate dinner with Bashar al-Assad has emerged at the moment the U.S Secretary of State is making the case to bomb the Syrian dictator’s country and remove him from power.

Kerry, who compared Assad to Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein yesterday, is pictured around a small table with his wife Teresa Heinz and the Assads in 2009.

Assad and Kerry, then a Massachusetts senator, lean in towards each other and appear deep in conversation as their spouses look on.

A waiter is pictured at their side with a tray of green drinks, believed to be lemon and crushed mint.

The picture was likely taken in February 2009 in the Naranj restaurant in Damascus, when Kerry led a delegation to Syria to discuss finding a way forward for peace in the region.

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Photo Credit: EPA

Photo Credit: EPA

Excerpted from Washington Times: The Obama national security team that wants to go to war with Syria and demonizes President Bashar Assad is the same group that, as senators, urged reaching out to the dictator.

As a bloc on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, President Obama, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Vice President Joseph R. Biden all opposed the George W. Bush administration’s playing tough with Mr. Assad.

None grew closer to Mr. Assad and promoted him in Washington more than Mr. Kerry.

“President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had,” Mr. Kerry, as a senator from Massachusetts, told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2011. He predicted that Mr. Assad would change for the better.

But that same month, pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in Syria that would lead to a civil war, unmasking Mr. Assad’s brutal tactics, including the Aug. 21 unleashing of nerve gas that killed more than 1,400 civilians.

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Biden: We’ll Target Congressmen Who Oppose Gun Control Efforts

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images (1)The White House will continue its push to strengthen gun control laws, even if it means targeting members of Congress who oppose its agenda, Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday.

“If Congress doesn’t act, we’ll fight for a new Congress,” Biden said in the Roosevelt Room of the White House as he swore in B. Todd Jones as the new director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “It’s that simple. But we’re going to get this done.”

In April, a bipartisan gun-control plan that would have expanded background checks and banned assault weapons failed to garner support in the Senate and was killed off, despite polls that showed massive public support in the wake of the Newtown, Conn. school massacre last Dec..

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Washington Man Charged with Shooting Shotgun, Says Vice President Biden Told Him To (+video)

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Photo Credit: White HouseA Vancouver man who fired a shotgun to chase away alleged car prowlers pleaded not guilty Wednesday and cited Vice President Joe Biden as the reason he did this…

Barton reportedly admitted to deputies that he fired his weapon while chasing away people who he thought were breaking into his vehicles at 5804 NE 124th St. in the early morning hours Monday.

Deputies are investigating whether a large teen party that got out of control at a neighbor’s home may have been linked to the shooting. However, at this point, deputies have said there was no evidence of prowlers on Barton’s property.

Outside the courtroom Wednesday, Barton cited the vice president in defense of his actions.

“I did what Joe Biden told me to do,” Barton told KOIN. “I went outside and fired my shotgun in the air.”

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Biden: Al Gore ‘Was Elected President of the United States’

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Photo Credit: AP

Vice President Joe Biden praised former Vice President Al Gore at a Washington fundraiser for U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Ed Markey after stating that Gore actually won the 2000 presidential election.

“This man was elected president of the United States of America,” Biden said, according to the media pool report. “No, no, no. He was elected president of the United States of America. But for the good of the nation, when the bad decision, in my view, was made, he did the right thing for the nation.”

Biden, a potential 2016 presidential candidate himself, complimented Gore’s acceptance of the Supreme Court decision to halt recounts in Florida, a decision which effectively gave the election to his Republican George W. Bush.

“I can’t think of very many who would put his country first like that, at a really, really, really difficult time,” he said, according to Yahoo News. “There’s an awful lot of folks Al and I both know who have run for president and still haven’t gotten over it.”

Before turning his attention to Markey, Biden remarked that history would favor Gore over Bush.

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