I've found another log to toss on the great pile or reasons to loathe the Very Serious People of DC and the traditional media. The perpetual eye-rolling to outright sneering directed at our VP.
I see it in news stories on basic cable. I read it in newspaper reports and Op/Eds. This garbage has been going on since the grand old man was announced as candidate Barack Obama's choice for Vice President, but I've finally hit my breaking point over the last week.
The man is not our national crazy uncle at Thanksgiving, he's one of the best of his party, and of us, out in Sally Quinn's and the late David Broder's shitty little cocktail party town. A place where the annual Washington's Correspondence Dinner is often more conversed about than the homeless people that get stepped over by our ruling class on the way into their offices. This time it was about gay rights. Maybe the next time Joe Biden makes the Very Serious People uncomfortable (to the point where he should have just 'hushed up' instead of being a little too bold with his words) will be about the poor, or about vets, or a minority community, the elderly, or even the sick. It's amazing to me how many of these 'Homer Simpson's father' framed events have actually been the VP speaking up bluntly about something we all talk about bluntly like regular human beings. God forbid, somebody speak out bluntly like the rest of us.
I'm God Damned proud that Joe Biden is VP.
I imagine an empty suit holding down the fort as VP in these times and I just want to puke. Sometimes I feel like the man is simply the voice of the current administration's conscience.
Now that the initial Great Gay Marriage Fainting Couch Rush of 2012 is in the rearview mirror, he did everybody who isn't a Movement Conservative a big fucking favor, especially the President. This had to end. Biden, unexpected or not, popped the bullshit balloon. Everybody knows that Barack Obama is going to go down in US history as one of the best US Presidents on gay rights, and this past moment simply ices the cake on that. We have a bitter and big dollar election to win, and this is going to help re-capture some of that fire that had, inevitably, faded with the reality of governing in a wanker's paradise where the worst of this nation hold an obstructionist veto over the best of us. The President is a good man who was stuck in a completely untenable position and everybody including the top man himself knew it. Now, he's free of it. Now, it's on. Any more "gaffes" like this one, and the unity that follows soon afterward might bring us that more closer to sealing the deal.
In the whole pants shitting and noxious fainting couch kabuki theatre to follow, people, many of them millionaires who simply don't give a rat's ass about the massive human suffering that is going on in this country that is staring us all in the face every day, or can't relate to it because it's all an abstract hypothetical to them, made sure to add a running current of Very Serious 'there he goes again, can't control grandpa/crazy uncle Joe'. Well, I think we could use a dozen more of him, not less of him. History is going to look back on this time and see two heroes taking the nation forward.
I'm not ashamed of Joe Biden. Not one bit. I don't consider him somebody that I have to toss up apologetic and/or dismissive qualifiers for when I discuss him. I have never rolled my eyes, pulled out my hair, and/or melodramatically buried my head in my hands over him over the last few years.
You know your country is half-fucked and on fire when a complete piece of... work like Grover Norquist, or a fungus growing on a piece of... work like Karl Rove, are folks treated as if they aren't hacks who are simply killing this country but serious voices in our discourse, and a good man like Joe Biden gets shit on by professional media fuckwits for having a soul and not being Village saavy enough to know not to show it.