(Guest post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

Hugh, below, and many others in the blogosphere (e.g., Tom Maguire and those he links), have thoughtful comments on Joe Biden's accidental truth-telling yesterday, when he dramatically predicted that America's enemies will quickly contrive crises to "test the mettle" of a young President Barack Obama.

I've only got two points to add, but they literally fill me with dread:

1. This grim prediction is Biden's own best-case scenario — that is, he thinks that Obama will make correct decisions in response to the crisis, but they will seem incorrect even to the Americans whose support Biden is now soliciting in advance. "[W]e're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right." Translation: Obama's decisions are likely to be supportable only on the basis of blind faith.

2. As Scott Johnson pointed out: "In Portland on May 18, [2008,] Obama cited John F. Kennedy's [June] 1961 summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna among the series of negotiations that led to America's triumph over the Soviet Union in the Cold War." Thus, despite his own Ivy League education and his having surrounded himself with supposed experts in foreign affairs, Obama has remained so ignorant of world history that he genuinely thought JFK's Vienna summit was a success. Instead, even Kennedy and his staff immediately realized that it had been a colossal failure. And history has shown that failed summit to have been a direct precursor and invitation to adventurous provocations which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, including the Communists' erection of the Berlin Wall beginning in August 1961 and the Soviets' emplacement of nuclear missiles in the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. (See also Matt Lewis' Townhall post today on this history.)

We all laugh, but we don't take it too seriously, when Obama mixes his metaphors to refer to himself as "green behind the ears." Sure, that's just a momentary bit of misspeaking, not much different from Biden declaring that "JOBS" is a three-letter word. Yet how can we hope along with Biden for a best-case scenario — when the would-be new president doesn't even know the most critical basic facts about the historical precedents for the challenges he is bound to face?