Calling it a Polish joke would not only be mean-spirited but would flout history. That being said, Vice President Joe Biden — the man who watched President Franklin D. Roosevelt address the American people on TV the day the stock market crashed (despite the fact FDR wasn’t president then and TV hadn’t been invented) — was in Poland today and in rare form. From Bloomberg:
“Fifteen years ago, I was honored, as the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to lead the fight for Poland’s admission into NATO,” Biden said in Warsaw during a visit designed to reassure America’s Eastern European allies in the wake of Russia’s move to take control of Crimea.
The only problem: Biden wasn’t chairman back then.
It was Sen. Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican, who guided the committee and launched the floor debate on granting NATO accession to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Biden did lead minority Democrats in approving the treaty resolution, after having initially expressed doubts about the political viability of expanding NATO.
