VP Joe Biden Totally On Message as He Speculates on Fresh Horrors that Closing Gitmo Will Unleash on Country

Well, he's on a message. Just because it happens to be Dick Cheney's message is no reason to judge Joe harshly. Baby steps:

Speaking to reporters on the final day of his tour of the Balkans, Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged the administration still hasn't figured out what to do with all the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay but predicted that it will still meet its deadline of closing the prison within a year. "I think so," Biden said, when asked about the January 2010 deadline. "But, look, what the president said is that this is going to be hard. It's like opening Pandora's Box. We don't know what's inside the box."

He added that it's probably best, since we won't know the extent of the spread of the released jihadis or the damage they might do, to stay off planes, trains, and completely out of the area known as "America" for the forseeable future, just to be safe. All right, I made that up, but isn't it great that we've moved past the "fear-mongering" of the Bush administration?

Presumably, Robert Gibbs will inform us of what the Vice President meant to say at his next briefing. The Weekly Standard humbly suggests that Joe Biden reach into Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's bag of tricks for future predicaments (and we all know they're coming!). From a September 1984 AP report:

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has agreed to campaign in his home state of New York for Walter F. Mondale, but Moynihan said Tuesday he doesn't think the Demcoratic presidential candidate has much chance to unseat President Reagan.

"I don't think so, do you?" he asked reporters at his semi-weekly news conference.

Moynihan immediately retrenched and said he meant to say that polls indicated Mondale trailed Reagan by a significant margin.

"I left that (polls) out," he said in response to a follow-up question. "I stand by what I meant to say."

Indeed.