How's It Going, Joe?

Toby Harnden of the UK Telegraph has another gem:

Thank goodness for Vice President Joe Biden. In one of the few amusing parts of the Wanda Sykes comedy routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, she said: "God forbid that Joe Biden falls into the hands of terrorists....We're done. Oh, they won't even have to torture him. All they have to do is go, 'How's it going, Joe?'"

Indeed. It seems that all a reporter has to do to find out about the pickle Barack Obama's is really in over his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison is to ask the veep, who was talking to the press at Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo on the final day of his trip to the Balkans.

So will Obama fulfill his vow - announced amid great fanfare in an executive order on day two of his presidency - to close the facility by January 2010? "I think so," Biden responded, according to Newsweek's Holly Bailey.

So perhaps he will. Or perhaps not. We'll see.

Biden continued: "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 also said that "to the best of my knowledge" the number of prisoners "who are a real danger who are not able to returned or tried" has "not been established" by the Obama administration.

So he basically just confirmed his predecessor Dick Cheney's analysis that the decision was taken "with little deliberation, and no plan".

Anybody who seriously analyzes Obama's decision to close Gitmo knows that it was made purely for political purposes with no actual investigation into what would be involved. He campaigned on it, is convinced that the world will love us again if we close it, and is also convinced that other countries will take some of these really bad guys.

It was a foolish decision and one that he'll have a tough time backing away from.