If President Barack Obama escalates the "disastrous" war in Afghanistan, Arianna Huffington has some advice for Vice President Joe Biden: resign. Planting The Huffington Post, her popular news and aggregation site, in an ever firmer place to the left of the Obama administration, Huffington cited the arguments Biden has made in private against Gen. Stanley McChrystal's request for 40,000 additional troops in Afghanistan, and wrote that "if the president does decide to escalate, Biden, for the good of the country, should escalate his willingness to act on those reservations."
Huffington's attack on the escalation plans under consideration by the White House ran under a banner headline which said: "Arianna: Why Joe Biden Should Resign."
While Huffington Post was decidedly pro-Obama in its 2008 campaign coverage, its editor-in-chief has not been afraid to take on his administration and the Democratic Congress. Just a few days ago, she told ABC News's George Stephanopoulos that embattled Democratic congressman Charles Rangel should step down from his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee while under an ethics investigation.
A long-time conservative who was once married to a Republican congressman before she underwent an ideological conversion experience, Huffington has turned her website into a popular platform for liberal bloggers but bristles at the idea that there's only a left and a right viewpoint on hot-button political issues. And she's adamant that her site will not simply carry water for the administration now. "There's absolutely no way you'd call the Huffington Post a partisan defender of the Obama White House," she told POLITICO in July.
Indeed, Huffington has been a fierce critic of both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and top economic adviser Larry Summers. In March, it was Geithner who was in Huffington's cross-hairs, and she also talked then about the need for a resignation. "[Use] any window dressing you want, just take the steering wheel out of Geithner's hands," Huffington wrote, noting that "it might seem extraordinary to be calling for the resignation or demotion of President Obama's point man on our financial system."
The following day, Huffington focused on the other high-profile economic guru. Her headline: "Larry Summers: Brilliant Mind, Toxic Ideas."
When writing about the economic crisis, Huffington has targeted Wall Street, wagging her finger at both Republicans and Democrats. Similarly, she's written critically of the lobbying industry--again, both sides of the aisle aren't immune. And now, after talking about the need for resignations from top White House officials and a powerful Democratic committee chairman, Huffington's latest column focuses on Biden, who she thinks should consider resigning out of principle, not because of incompetence or malfeasance.
"If Biden truly believes that what we're doing in Afghanistan is not in the best interests of our national security -- and what issue is more important than that?" she wrote, then keeping his doubts to himself would not be enough. And once he resigned, she wrote, he "would then become the natural leader of the movement to wind down this disastrous war and focus on the real dangers in Pakistan," she wrote.