Cowboys? or Uncowboys?

A correspondent at another cyber location brought to my attention that Joe Biden, in an October campaign speech in Seattle, said that "the world" would "test" President Obama shortly after he takes office.

“Mark my words,” Biden said, “it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy,” making an obvious reference to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Biden is a foreign policy wonk. He's an international relations big shot in the Senate and he gets regular briefings from the CIA, NSA, etc.

However, we don't need inside sources to know that the Russian president, What'shisname (Putin's sock puppet), has announced that his country is ready to foment an eastern-European version of the Cuban missile crisis, in response to the Bush administration's hare-brained, deliberately provocative installation of U.S. missiles in Poland, since that story has been on network TV. I'm sure that's at least part of what Biden was referring to.

But I'm not sure why this is such a big deal. The Russians are saying they're going to react to our missiles in Poland exactly the same way we did when they installed their missiles in Cuba in 1962. So where's the crisis? or the "test," as Biden would have it?

This should be a no-brainer. Obama should remove the missiles from Poland, which Bush had no business putting there. Actually, I don't know if they're already installed, in the process of being installed, or still in the planning stage. And I also don't know if what Biden and Obama plan in response to this "test" that's coming down the road, but that response should be obvious.

However, I do know that the neocon legacy of yanking other people's chains, swaggering around the world like a ruff, tuff creampuff, playing the bully, and habitually provoking everyone like effing idiot as Bush and Cheney did, this is not the way to achieve the "peace" they said they wanted, or the way to put an end to war.

Maybe Obama and Biden will do a little better with this kind of stuff. That remains to be seen.