Joe Foreign Policy Whiz KidBiden
The former Senator-for-Life from Delaware, an example of the kind of top-notch Washington intellect to be found in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body...
...and a clear demonstration that the Framers were wrong in that not every small state has two qualified citizens to send to the Senate...
offered Turkey's Islamist government a leading role in the Middle East, despite its recent crackdown on dissidents, expansion of Islamic culture and education, and regional conflicts with Greece and Israel.
"We're looking for Turkish leadership in the rest of that entire region," Biden declared at a fundraiser attended by roughly 200 people from the Turkish and Azerbaijani communities, according to a White House pool report.
"It's a model as to how you can have an Islamic population, an Islamic state and a democracy, something the rest of the region is groping to figure out how to do," he told the audience, who paid up to $2,500 each to attend the fundraiser.
I recall GWHB saying nice things about Ferdinand Marcos when he was in the Philippines on a diplomatic mission. Being VP does that to you, and then it comes back to haunt you...
Turkey's ability to moderate the Islamist revolution is limited because Islamists in Egypt and nearby countries distrust Turkey's government. They fear Turkey will seek a dominant role in the region, as it once had when its Ottoman Empire governed the region from the 1300s until 1923.
Still, Biden and Obama are backing Turkey.
"Turkey is such an incredible model," Biden told his fundraiser audience Friday.