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This Just In: Biden his time

Don't know much about history

By Dan Kennedy

No one has ever accused US Senator Joseph Biden (D-Delaware) of being overqualified. Still, Biden may have reached a new low on Monday, when he cited the lessons of history in supporting plans to incorporate Eastern Europe into NATO.

"World War I, World War II," he intoned. "By the way, for those wars to get to France, they had to roll into Poland first -- on the way."

Two problems.

First, Poland didn't exist before World War I, at least not as an independent state. Polish territory had been divided up among Austria, Russia, and Prussia more than 100 years earlier. The war began when Germany (Prussia's successor state) attacked France and Russia almost simultaneously.

Second, though it's true that Germany, at the outset of World War II, "rolled into Poland" before invading France, only the most geographically challenged (Biden, for instance) would argue that Poland was "on the way." Germany lies in the center of Europe, with France to its west and Poland to its east. But why should a United States senator be expected to know that?