Crossposted from Hillbilly Report. Join the discussion from Rural America. City Slickers welcome too!!

During the Bush years we saw many failures in foreign policy and national security. From missing a memo entitled "Bin-Laden Determined to Strike in the United States" to attacking the wrong country and wasting over a trillion dollars and thousands of lives, to isolating America from its allies in the world the Bush Administration led by "Shotgun" Cheney dangerously blundered along under a false vision and a failed pretense.

Yes, their failure in the attacks on 9-11 gave the neo-cons the golden opportunity to pass all the measures that they had drooled over for years, and all of them proved dismal and complete failures.

To be honest, Obama, you lost me when you voted for the PATRIOT Act reauthorization in 2006. You lost me again when you voted for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) amendment in 2008. And you lost me every single time you voted for yet more war funding.

Don't even get me started on your vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.

I cast a ballot for you in November, but I just can't share in this moment of collective euphoria over your election.

So, if your transition team really wants feedback on "where President-Elect Obama should lead this country," here's a Top Five list:

Biden channels Democratic outrage for 3 lovely minutes:

At a town-hall meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida, Joe Biden promised investigations - and possible prosecutions - of Bush's crimes.

Looking to the future but with one eye on the past, Biden also promised that an Obama-Biden government would go through Bush administration data with "a fine-toothed comb" and pursue criminal charges if necessary. 

"If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation," he said, "they will be pursued, not out of vengeance, not out of retribution - out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no one, no attorney general, no president, no one is above the law."

How long will it take for the Republican Party and the Corporate Media to unleash a vicious counterattack on Biden and Obama?

What an incredible introduction by Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden!

Joe Biden excerpts:

As we gather here tonight, our country is less secure and more isolated than at any time in recent history.  The Bush-McCain foreign policy has dug us into a very deep hole, with very few friends to help us climb out.

Should we trust John McCain's judgment when he says there can be no timelines to drawdown our troops from Iraq - that we must stay indefinitely?

Or should we listen to Barack Obama, who says shift responsibility to the Iraqis - and set a time to bring our combat troops home?

Now, after six long years, the Bush administration and the Iraqi government are on the verge of setting a date to bring our troops home.

John McCain was wrong. Barack Obama was right.

Joe Biden isn't a progressive, which is why he got nowhere in the primaries. He's awful on bankruptcy and puts corporations before people on financial issues. And he voted for the invasion of Iraq.

Even so, he has some good points:

I hope that we can all have constructive discussions about all of the candidates as we get closer to the primaries.  The 2008 Election will be the most important vote we will cast in our lifetime.  Earlier I had posted various positions that Joe Biden has taken on various subjects.  I think we all need to take a hard look at each candidate and where they are on the issues.  I am a lifelong Democrat and will vigorously support our party no matter who is nominated by the process.  We all have particular issues we are passionate about, but I hope that we can approach this process in a pragmatic way.  This forum is strictly for everyone to voice their thoughts, suggestions, opinions and views about all of the presidential candidates, voicing the contrasts of all of the presidential candidates.

Joe Biden at the Harkin Steak Fry

After listening to the questions asked by Brian Williams in South Carolina at the first debate of announced Democratic presidential contenders, one has to wonder how much worse the moderation would have been if it had been on the Fox Network.

There was hardly an inane smear, knock, superficial or unfair attack made against any of these candidates that Williams did not go OUT of his way to highlight or demand that they defend themselves against. We had the price of haircuts, misquotes about positions on Palestine, ties to Walmart, not to mention an entire segment on Giuliani's despicable "die under Democrats" rhetoric from yesterday, instantly elevated to the status of accepted mainstream gospel and framed as such. If most of the questions had been prefaced with the words "Karl Rove says" their slant could not have been more obvious. Even the questions selected from viewer emails seemed to be selected with that criteria in mind.

Clearly having had enough of Republican colleagues putting their blind loyalty to George W. Bush ahead of American opinion and the lives of our troops, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) gave a powerful speech on the Senate floor Wednesday in which he ripped the GOP for their failure to lead and fulfill their duties to our country.

Saying "our troops don’t lose wars, bad polices, bad leadership loses wars," Biden, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, let loose during comments before the vote to even open debate on the Democratic proposal to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by this time next year.

Here's Biden on the Senate's responsibility to the troops:

In what will undoubtedly prove to be an awkward bit of timing for her, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will go before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, where she can expect to be grilled on George W. Bush's speech last night, in which he announced an escalation of the Iraq war, despite most of the country, the Congress and his top Generals in the field disagreeing with that approach.

Rice can also expect to be quizzed on the conduct of the war so far, as well as what she intends to do on some sort of diplomatic outreach to Syria and Iran -- you know, given that her job is supposed to be about establishing relationships with other countries that actually benefit the United States and not just about waging war.