You collectors out there run -- don't walk -- to buy a hard copy of today's Washington Post. Forget the one from Obama's Inauguration, or the day McKinley was shot, or the day the Hindenburg crashed. They are worthless by comparison. For today, WaPo columnist Jim Hoagland has a genuine piece of history: The first -- and maybe only -- paean to Joe Biden. It is beyond hilarious in its obsequiousness. Were John Stewart not such a partisan hack himself, he could have penned it, with its almost tongue-in-cheek soaring, laudatory rhetoric. But sadly, this is not satire. It's the real thing: Adoration of that lovable ol' marginalized gaffe machine - Joe Biden.
In the most recent edition of the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes, citing Obama's laughable reference to the undistinguished Veep in his speech to Congress, "Nobody messes with Joe," notes correctly, "In truth, nobody pays any attention to Joe, as Obama surely knows." To that point, it appears even the left-leaning mainstream media figured that out pretty early on, some time between Joe's second and third failed bids for the Presidency. Even the Obama Administration's house organ, the NY Times, says today about Joe:
"Joe Biden now has the title [of Vice President], the residence and the security detail, but the position has been dummied down. Mostly, President Obama treats him like a latter-day Paul Shaffer, humoring him briefly, then shunting him off-stage before he goes on too long."
Contrary to Hoagland's fawning premise that "Obama's Mr. Fix-It" (that would be Joe) is headed to Brussels to broker the beginning of world peace, as anyone who's been reading the papers (including the NY Times) since Inauguration Day knows, Obama is likely sending Biden to Brussels to get him the hell out of town. A quick scan of YouTube will tell you why. Maybe Hoagland's got a non-digital TV that doesn't get YouTube.
So do get a copy and frame it. Presidents will come and go, dirigibles will launch and crash, but outside of maybe The Onion, you'll never see another piece like this.