James Lileks is either less merely elementally offended by the Vice President that we’ve been saddled with, or else he’s better at hiding it:

It takes years of yoga to learn the posture necessary for speaking clearly with all your feet in your mouth. But for some the skill comes naturally, which brings us to Joe Biden. Those who saw Dick Cheney as an evil genius crouched silent in the shadows of the Oval Office like Nosferatu must enjoy Biden’s high profile: he’s out there daily with the sunny enthusiasm of Ronald McDonald opening another store. And, quite often, telling everyone to have a Whopper.

Read the whole thing, and no need to point out that Whoppers come from Burger King: remember, this is Biden that we’re talking about, here. Unlike Lileks, I’m not convinced that the VP’s unrehearsed comments represent the thinking of this administration, mostly because I’m not convinced that there’s anything that represents the thinking of this administration. The slapdash strategy of the White House towards pursuing its goals – which apparently can be summed up in two words: ‘sign something‘ – could be easily making the Vice President’s utterances look more important than they actually are.  After all, we’ve become accustomed to having someone who should be taken seriously being in that spot – so when POTUS is giving us rhetoric with the semantic content of tapioca pudding, it seems natural to assume that VPOTUS at least is providing something with more heft to it.  Whether this is a justified assumption, or not.

Still, either way… you know, ‘they told me that if I voted for John McCain‘ we’d end up with a Vice President who kept mucking up things on a fundamental level – and they were right.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.