THE LOW POST: Eat Me, Joe Biden

Biden at the time also complained that Republicans were getting away with taking credit for the idea of a pre-emptive war, when it was really a Democratic idea. "What is so transformational in the last four years is that these assholes who wouldn't give President Clinton the authority to use force" have now become, Biden said, moral interventionists. He added: "Give me a fucking break."

Of course all of that mine's-bigger-than-yours militarist rhetoric is staying in Biden's garage this election season, as he's chosen to attack the Republicans on Iraq now, not his fellow Democrats, which ought to tell you where the polls on that issue are. But Biden attacking Rumsfeld even on the issue of his conduct of the war is outrageous in itself, for other reasons.

Right around the time Biden and his fellow Democrats launched their Rumsfeld attack, the Defense Department released a study showing that an inordinately high number of military recruits were being disqualified from service in Iraq because of debt problems, often resulting from so-called "payday loans," i.e. very high-interest loans made between paychecks by predatory lenders who set up show outside military bases.

The study made the front page of USA Today and was briefly a media sensation, with many commentators noting the injustice of a system that allows credit companies to prey upon young men and women about to serve in the Iraq bloodbath. Making matters worse was the fact that Congress voted specifically to deny debt protection to servicemen a year and a half ago.

Back in early 2005, Senator Dick Durbin proposed an amendment to the infamous S. 256, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 ?- better known as the Bankruptcy Bill, a law pushed by credit companies which made it more or less impossible to declare bankruptcy.

Durbin's amendment, called the G.I. Protection Amendment, would have exempted U.S. servicemen and women from the so-called "means test," a procedure which under the new law every bankruptcy aspirant must submit to before he is allowed to sue for bankruptcy. It also would have protected soldiers from losing their homes to creditors during their deployments, and would have offered some debt protections to the spouses of slain servicemen. It also would have offered some protections to soldiers in trouble because of payday loans.