IS JOE EVER RIGHT? – AT 9:05 A.M. ET:  Joe Biden is a nice guy with one of the worst track records on foreign-policy judgment in recorded history.  Now, at Harvard, he speaks again, and he's wrong again.  From The Hill: 

Vice President Biden argued Thursday night in a foreign policy address at Harvard University that Americans “face no existential threat” from terrorism.

Imploring students to keep the threat posed by violent extremists “in perspective,” Biden said that although the country must remain vigilant, terrorists did not fundamentally challenge “our way of life or our security.”

“Let me say it again: We face no existential threat — none — to our way of life or our ultimate security,” Biden said. “You are twice as likely to be struck by lightning as you around to be affected by a terrorist event in the United States.”

The vice president’s comments come the week after the U.S. expanded its bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which President Obama described in a “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday as posing “immediate threats to the United States.”

“These folks could kill Americans,” Obama said.

Biden acknowledged that ISIS had demonstrated “the most blatant use of terrorist tactics the world has seen in a long, long time,” but said the U.S. knows “how to deal with them.”

“While we face an adaptive, resilient enemy, let’s never forget that they're no match for an even more resilient and adaptive group of people, the American people, who are so much tougher, smarter, realistic and gutsy than their political leadership gives them credit for,” Biden said.

COMMENT:  The problem with Biden's logic, of course, is that he's assuming terrorist groups will continue to be restricted to conventional weapons.  But what if, as is probably inevitable, they actually acquire WMD, including nuclear warheads?  No existential threat?  Three well-placed nuclear bombs in the United States could kill, in an instant, more Americans than have died in all our wars put together, and could cripple the American economy for years.  That's what Biden should be worried about.

October 3, 2014