So the first of what has become a pastime of recent two-term presidencies is out today: a critical memoir from a senior cabinet official. Former defense secretary Bob Gates has a memoir coming out that looks to be very hard on Obama, but perhaps even harder on Obama’s would-be successors Joe Biden and Hillary.
Of Slow-Joe Biden, Gates writes that “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” and that he nearly resigned in 2009 over Obama’s dithering over Afghanistan.
As usual, Bob Woodward seems to have the inside track on Gates’s forthcoming book, noting that the book “reflects outright contempt for Vice President Joe Biden and many of Obama’s top aides.”
The most shocking part of Woodward’s report is this passage, buried well down in the piece:
“Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”
Not that we needed more evidence that liberals are about politics over principle and the national interest.
The Wall Street Journal is out with an excerpt from the book.
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