Show Joe a little love!

At this lonely redoubt, we have spent much of our time lampooning one (or "the One," as his most ardent sycophants would refer to him) B. Hussein Obama. We have cataloged his massive spending and discussed how the now-looming tax increases will wreck the foundations of our economy.

We have also mocked his slavish addiction to his teleprompter, his bent towards double-speak and the assortment of kooks, misfits and ne'er-do-wells with which he has surrounded himself. What we have neglected to do is to show the same esteem and appreciation for the man who plays Deputy Barney Fife to Obama's Sheriff Andy Taylor. In overlooking the singular contributions of Joe Biden, we have done a great injustice to him, and to you Gentle Reader.

By the glint in fortune's eye, the stalwarts at Fox News have compiled a list (that will surely increase by the day) of Biden's contributions to the functioning of the republic since his nomination as candidate for VP. Biden's history of gaffes and malapropisms is well-established (see here, here and here); what Fox has done culled the finest and most notable of these and - rather miraculously, if I might say - condensed them down to one webpage. They managed to include one of my personal favorites:

In a Sept. 22, 2008, CBS interview, Biden misspoke when he said Franklin D. Roosevelt was president when the stock market crashed in 1929.

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened," he said.

Herbert Hoover - not Roosevelt - was president in 1929, and television had not yet been invented in 1929.

And how can anyone forget:

During a Sept. 12, 2008, speech in Columbia, Mo., Biden called for Missouri State Sen. Chuck Graham, who is wheelchair-bound, to "stand up."

"Oh, God love ya," Biden said, after realizing his mistake. "What am I talking about?"

And to remind us that Biden's abuses of the spoken word can turn fratricidal, we present:

On Jan. 31, 2007 - the day Biden announced his presidential bid - the Delaware Senator was roundly criticized for calling Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

and:

During his first campaign rally with Obama as his vice presidential running mate on Aug. 23, 2008, Biden introduced Obama by saying, "A man I'm proud to call my friend. A man who will be the next President of the United States - Barack America!"

But beyond Biden's verbal dysfunctions, we must never forget that as it pertains to most issues of consequence, he has been flat wrong over the last thirty years. An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal reminds us of one of Biden's more exceptionable errors in advocating a "soft-partition" of Iraq.

At the Democratic convention, Joe Biden had the opportunity to showcase his foreign policy experience. Yet his principal and most recent foreign policy initiative - his plan for the soft partition of Iraq - was glaringly absent from his acceptance speech. When Barack Obama named his running mate, he ticked off Mr. Biden's work on a range of other foreign policy issues - from chemical weapons to Bosnia. But there was no mention of Mr. Biden's plan for Iraq.

This was a remarkable omission. Mr. Biden's Iraq plan had been a central theme of his own presidential campaign, and the subject of numerous addresses, television appearances, and op-eds. He authored a Senate resolution, passed in September, that reflected his plan, and he even created a Web site to promote it: www.planforiraq.com. But there is no more talk about that Senate resolution. And the Web site has been quietly taken down.

Why the sudden silence?

Since Biden announced his plan to establish a Kurdish state in Iraq's northern provinces, a Shiite state south of Baghdad and a Sunni state north and northwest of Baghdad, events have evidenced the wisdom of George W. Bush's surge strategy. As the Council of Foreign Relation's Dan Senor notes in his Journal piece, "if [Obama and Biden] now believe that Mr. Biden's signature plan was a mistake, should they acknowledge that in a more serious way than by simple omission?"

So the Left is left with a dilemma. Namely, how to convince the American people that Gov. Sarah Palin would have been a demonstrably Vice-President than Mr. Biden. In as much as Ms. Palin could see "Russia from her house" (a line more attributable to Tina Fey than to Palin), Joe seems unable to see the need for a degree of security as it pertains to his house. I fully expect to read that Biden has set the Naval Observatory on fire trying to roast marshmallows.

I'll go out on a limb to suggest that we can all agree with Biden about one thing. As the Fox News website reminds us:

At a Sept. 10, 2008, town hall meeting in Nashua, N.H., Biden said, "Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Quite frankly, it might have been a better pick than me."

Amen to that!