The American Spectator

Many a patriotic heart races and stumbles at the thought of Joe Biden being one heart-beat away from the Oval Office. He’s the only man in the republic who can make conservatives think warm thoughts about Barack Obama and pray for his good health.

Biden is as left-wing as Obama. He’s also impulsive, thoughtless, easily excitable, narcissistic, and has a room-temperature IQ. You could say that he speaks before he thinks if there were any evidence that he’s capable of thought.

What Biden frequently comes out with aren’t exactly gaffes. A gaffe is usually defined as when a politician accidently utters the truth. So his phantasms are in another category. Blog items are supposed to be short, so I can’t catalogue Biden’s rhetorical knee-slappers, but most of you are familiar with them. I can say that my favorite is how he explained that when the stock-market crashed in 1929 as a preface to the Great Depression, President Roosevelt went on television to reassure the nation. That’s the sort of wisdom, incisiveness, and historical perspective that waits in the wings should, God forbid, something happen to our rookie president.

Unlike the horror expressed by the left-stream media over the prospect of Sarah Palin being “a heart-beat away,” crazy Uncle Joe’s idiocies are met in these quarters with a kind of tolerant affection. Here’s the Washington Post Alexandra Petri after Biden’s latest — the “back in chains” riff: “He inspires the sort of discomfort one feels upon introducing one’s fiancé to Grandpa after he has had a Scotch too many.”

Well, isn’t that cozy and special? Makes you almost want to know the guy. Many of us have and love relations just like this. (“Uncle Buford’s at the door — hide the single-malt!”)

Somehow I don’t recall this level of jocularity when Palin was on a national ticket. And it’s my understanding that people still approach Dan Quayle on golf courses to demand why he can’t spell “potato.” Joe gets a pass. Conservatives get the shaft. Well, at least we know the rules.