Here we go again.

It's still three years before the next presidential campaign, and already we’re seeing the same old Democratic Party relics dragged out of their offices, spiffed up with new hairdos, and paraded before the media as Great White Hopes.

The latest such fossil to be put on display is Sen. Joe Biden, a man whose last foray into presidential politics in 1988 fizzled out when he had to admit that his speeches were plagiarized. But that's not Biden’s worst fault--only his most pathetic. This is a guy who, as a senator from Delaware, has for decades dutifully done the bidding of the du Pont chemical company, a virtual feudal overlord of the state of Delaware and one of the great poisoners of the nation's air, water, and labor relations.

He has also, in the Senate, dutifully protected Delaware's position as a kind of domestic Cayman Islands, a place corporations can hide their corporate headquarters, using handy mail drop boxes in the Wilmington post office in place of real offices, so as to duck shareholder suits, hide profits from other states’ tax authorities, and make investigation of their activities by regulators and journalists the more difficult.

Biden, in his role as senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has also been a loyal defender of American imperial overreach, dutifully voting for the trumped up invasion of Iraq, and for the Patriot Act and other measures introduced by the Bush administration in the name of its phony War on Terror.

Just imagine Biden and Senate colleague Hillary Clinton, another Democratic Leadership Council relic being improbably touted as something fresh and new, vying in the primaries with each other for the party's presidential nomination by arguing which of them would take a tougher line in Iraq, or offer the most far-reaching free trade agreement with Latin America or Asia.

It's a dismal picture, and bodes well for continued Republican dominance in Washington.