Napoleon on the Radio

Well, what Prof. Sartwell obviously doesn't understand is that Joe Biden isn't a prattling, self-aggrandizing ignoramus; he's an author of high-literary alternate histories. No, seriously. Dude's actually a bullshit artist. Crispy has a few other notes on the liberal problem of Biden-Palin moral non-equivalence, of which this is just about right in substance and tone.

In almost every way, the capitulation of the Democrats' supposed Progressive base to the Necessity of Biden is even more alarming and shameful than the early Republican enthusiasm for their own dumb VP-aspirant. Palin was selected precisely because she reassured an important, realtively more ideological faction within the conservative coalition. She's a small-town, religious conservative, and her moral hypocrisies, which liberals take such pleasure in pointing out, are the moral hypocrisies of small-town and rural life in America. Having to reconcile filial sexuality and pregnancy with public piousness only endears her more to her core supports, as these are precisely the moral dilemmas they face in their own lives. I have news, too, for liberals: we very rarely, any of us, reach solutions to such dilemmas through our own moral consistency.

Progressives, meanwhile, weren't appeased by Biden. On the contrary, they should have been appalled. If Obama's pitiful and weak-willed shuffle toward foreign-policy hawkishness could be painfully explained away by necessity (it couldn't really, but still), then the selection of a war-supporter as running mate should surely have broken the camel's back. In the midst of two disastrous foreign wars and a great unraveling of the American economy, you have the man who perhaps most represents the Democrats' investment in the war and connections to the finance-and-credit industries as the number two man on the ticket--this, apparently, because he is "experienced," a steady hand, a man with knowledge of the issues.

Despite this, he was embraced and is now defended. "Well, what he meant to say was . . ." The difference between Palin and Biden, such as it is, is that Biden is better and more practiced at dishonesty. Sarah Palin stumbles because she hasn't yet developed the skills, and perhaps lacks the intellect, to extemporize fluent false statements and has to resort to the more difficult task of putting discrete, pre-memorized lies into some semblance of order. Biden is smart enough to make the shit up as he goes along. That hardly makes him preferable, ethically or politically. It just makes him an asshole, and his newfound supporters the biggest hypocrites of all.