Joe Biden??

Seriously. This has to be a joke. After a week of teasing the press into a state of turgidity not seen outside some place with a name like “The Champagne Room”, Barack Obama picked notorious blowhard and Peter Principle posterboy Joe Biden as his running mate. The candidate of hope and change picked a guy who has been in the Senate since 1973 (I guess Ted Kennedy’s illness ruled him out, huh?). Democrats all over the country have got to be waking up with a wicked, wicked case of buyer’s remorse right about now.

A serious candidate does not spend the whole week tossing around names and leading reporters around by the nose only to pick a Senator whose own Presidential campaign in this same election year lasted less time than the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk. Did Obama confuse his list of Vice Presidential candidates with his list of pretentious blowhards who shouldn’t get within ten miles of his campaign? There is no one on this planet who thinks more highly of Joe Biden than Joe Biden and if you give him the chance, he will fill the air with a wearying haze of words telling you that very thing.

Did Obama completely forget the whole episode where Biden spent the week apologizing for calling him “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”? Or when Biden pitched the fact that his state used to be a slave state as positive point to separate it from the elitist liberal northeastern states? How about just last month when he revealed that there are no bad guys in Iraq? How about when he said he’d “move to impeach the President” even though Senators has no power at all to do so? Where on Earth was his staff when he was making this pick?

Joe Biden is such an inappropriatechoice that I have to wonder if Obama’s first three or four choices didn’t turn him down. That would certainly explain the disorganized mess this choice has appeared to be. It could also explain why the campaign announced it in the dead of night at the very end of the week when it would get a relatively tiny amount of press coverage when it happened. That’s not exactly a show of pride there. It’s almost like the Obamessiah was ashamed of having to pick Biden and kind of snuck him in there the way a frat boy sneaks the coyote-ugly chick he picked up at the party the night before out of his apartment at 5 AM on a Saturday morning before his roommate wakes up and gets a really good look at her.

On the other hand, Biden is perhaps the only person in public office more prone to saying dumb stuff off the cuff than Barack Obama, so that’ll make him look really good by comparison.