Ah, what would we do without Joe Biden?

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”.

You know, we could just try not opening the box. That’s the problem with throwing away things that already work just to score PR points. What could go wrong? Only one way to find out, after all!

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Democrats are clearly starting to sweat the President’s decision to close Gitmo. Backers of the move are pushing Obama to produce his plan - which they believe is necessary to justify the decision to the American public. Opponents are beginning to wish the issue would go away. House Republicans obviously believe this is one area where they are right on policy, and right on politics. Tonight they’ve debuted a centralized website to help make their case:

Go check it out.

Goldfarb notes this hilarious attempt to claim that Republicans opposed to moving detainees from Guantanamo into their districts are - wait for it - insulting America’s corrections officers:

ON GUANTANAMO, GOP DISPARAGES MEN AND WOMEN WHO KEEP OUR COMMUNITIES SAFE

Why do Republicans think that Americans can’t do their jobs?

Today, John Boehner and the Republican House leadership are introducing legislation to keep Guantanamo detainees from being transferred to facilities in the United States. They claim that this serves American security. But the reality is that our criminal justice system has a long history of holding hardened terrorists successfully, including the perpetrator of the first World Trade Center attacks, numerous 9/11 conspirators, the Shoe Bomber and Timothy McVeigh. The men and women who serve their country by working at these facilities are ready and eager to do their jobs – and they have the confidence of the communities that depend economically on prison facilities. But John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and other Republicans in Congress continue to claim that the men and women who run our prisons and help keep America safe can’t do their jobs.

Let’s review the varieties of stupid here.

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