a Dem hawk bares his claws and nobody notices?

I don’t have the patience to read commentary on the convention, which, despite my better instincts, I did watch for a couple of hours last night. Having watched, I feel compelled to note what I picked up in Biden’s call-out to “traditional” Dems—especially because it was so weirdly out of place in the current left/liberal/progressive/Dem “discourse” about foreign policy.

Biden is a total hawk:

And for the last seven years, the administration has failed to face the biggest — the biggest forces shaping this century: the emergence of Russia, China, and India as great powers; the spread of lethal weapons; the shortage of secure supplies of energy, food and water; the challenge of climate change; and the resurgence of fundamentalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the real central front in the war on terror.

Ladies and gentlemen, in recent years and in recent days, we’ve once again seen the consequences of the neglect — of this neglect with Russia challenging the very freedom of a new democratic country of Georgia. Barack and I will end that neglect. We will hold Russia accountable for its actions, and we will help the people of Georgia rebuild. [and the crowd roared ---ed.]…

Al Qaida and the Taliban, the people who actually attacked us on 9/11, they’ve regrouped in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan and they are plotting new attacks. And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has echoed Barack’s call for more troops. …

Doesn’t this rather sound as if Biden is on the warpath?

Who’s the warmonger now?

It’s all rather odd.

The only other pundit I’ve read who has noted the foreign policy confusion among Dems is Matt Welch, who wrote this before Biden’s speech at the convention:

All We Are Saying Is, Make Smarter War
Will Democratic foreign policy be built by the hawkish Madeleine Albright?

Here’s one reference to the foreign policy part of Biden’s speech that (spectacularly) misses the obvious:

Looking abroad, Biden slammed McCain repeatedly for his poor judgment on everything from Iraq to Iran to Afghanistan to international diplomacy: “Again and again, on the most important national security issues of our time, John McCain was wrong, and Barack Obama was proven right.”

Biden did a lot more than slam McCain’s judgment. He laid out an aggressively interventionist foreign policy under an Obama administration.

Are pundits trying to hide this, or didn’t they notice?