In its opening sketch last night, NBC's "Saturday Night Live" mocked Vice President Joe Biden and healthcare reform.

With the President out of the country for a week, Biden, played by Jason Sudeikis, has picked the lock on the Oval Office in order to get something big done while Obama is gone.

He opted not to solve what's going on in Afghanistan because it's "a mess - it can't be fixed...It's worse than Scranton."

As for fixing the economy, "We already did it...The stimulus is working."

With that in mind, Biden opted to reform healthcare by "[caving] in like crazy!...The President wants to pass a healthcare bill so bad that he will literally sign anything" (video embedded below the fold, h/t Story Balloon): 

Thursday’s off-lead story by James Glanz and Walter Gibbs is on recent revelations that Peter Galbraith, an “unpaid adviser to the Kurds” who has influenced Democratic policymakers like former senator (now Vice President) Joe Biden and Sen. John Kerry, stands to make millions from his closeness to the Kurds and a Norwegian oil company.

Given the typical Times sympathies for anti-war and leftish “blood for oil” arguments, the Times couldn’t ignore the story, and indeed provides a lot of new damning details -- but also has one enormous gaffe that lets Vice President Biden off the hook.

Chris Wallace's much-awaited "Fox News Sunday" interview with conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh began exactly as one might have expected with the guest stating right from the start:

I'm really, really worried. We've never seen this kind of radical leadership at such a high level of power in the -- in the country. I believe that the economy is under siege, is being destroyed. Anybody with any economic literacy would not do one thing this administration's done to try to revitalize the private sector. They're destroying it. And I have to think that it may be on purpose, because this is just outrageous, what is happening -- a denial of liberty, an attack on freedom.  

And that was just the beginning.

From there, Wallace and Limbaugh discussed healthcare reform, Afghanistan, Fox News, the NFL, painkillers, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, and the future of the Republican Party (videos embedded below the fold in three parts with full transcript): 

Update [Ken Shepherd, managing editor]: Scarborough responds via Twitter, insisting he was joking [see more at bottom of post]. Video embedded to the right.

Joe Biden is the "greatest Vice President of our time."

No, dear reader, I have not lost my marbles.  I'm merely citing MSNBC's token quasi-conservative Joe Scarborough, who said on this morning's edition of "Morning Joe":

We understand that Joe Biden's numbers are going down, which I think is just stupid because all he has done is – I mean, he's become, in a couple of short months, the greatest vice president of our time.

Not content to allow his credibility to go down in flames alone, Joe took the rest of the Brew Crew with him:

It's bad enough that the new design of Newsweek came with blatant cover-story campaigning for Joe Biden. Then in the next edition, when it was time for Letters to the Editor, was there any chance of an anti-Biden message being published? No.

In the October 26 edition, there were only four pro-Biden letters hailing his "valiant voice of sanity." But here's where it gets funny: Newsweek ran a chart of its reader mail. Of the letters on the Biden cover, it said 25 percent were positive, 25 percent were neutral, and 50 percent were critical.

Not one of them was worthy? It's like Newsweek is saying: "Stop criticizing our heroes. We're not going to publishing your critical letters anyway."

In fact, this issue ran only seven letters: four for Biden, two criticizing Newsweek for allowing Christopher Hitchens to lament Obama's Nobel Prize, and one generic attack on "the right wing media."

Three weeks after their gushing praise of President Obama's meeting with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the media have taken a cue from the lack of action that followed.

It was a good run while it lasted.

Word from the conflict became more dire almost by the day as Obama's cabinet squabbled. The American media, having sensed Afghanistan could be lost without action, chose to cover for their favorite president and begin the process of mentally preparing the public for defeat.

The Washington Post published a perfect example of the new meme in Howard Kurtz's column on October 23. Kurtz attacked Republicans as "armchair quarterbacks" for their criticism of Obama's stalling and said it was "rich" of Dick Cheney to demand a new plan. As for what that plan might be, Kurtz's Vietnam defeat song sounded all too familiar:

Last week’s Newsweek starkly illustrated on its cover again just how much it’s rooting for the perpetual Obama-Biden campaign. Next to a picture of firm, smiling Vice President Biden were the words "WHY JOE IS NO JOKE: From Afghanistan to Health Care, a Vice President to be Reckoned With." It looked so much like a campaign sign, readers might have been unsure whether to read it or nail to a piece of wood and post it in the front yard.

Inside were several pictures of Joe Cool – Biden in sunglasses rocking the tarmac at the Atlantic City airport. The headline of the article was "An Inconvenient Truth Teller: From Health-Care Reform to Afghanistan, Joe Biden Has Bucked Obama – As Only a Good Veep Can."

This is not the way Newsweek saw Dick Cheney, obviously. In February of 2006, they made a cover story out of the Cheney hunting accident.

The Biden cover story by Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas insists that Biden is getting over his gaffe-prone ways, not that they were "damaging" – what with the media trying hard to ignore them, unlike the Dan Quayles of the world. Biden was never a buffoon:

At least he didn't call them "clean and articulate" . . .

Joe Biden has given the latest, best example of the adage that "a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth."

Appearing on Good Morning America today to talk up Pres. Obama's health care speech to Congress, the veep praised his boss for debunking various supposedly false assertions, including "how we're going to insure illegal aliens."  Biden was just about to move on when, realizing his crime against political correctness, he revised his remark: "undocumented aliens," quoth the VP.

Radio's Don Imus appeared on a special Labor Day edition of "Hannity" Monday evening, and really let President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have it.

In a no holds barred discussion on Fox News, Imus said he thought Obama "was a hypocrite and a phony," and that Biden, in the 100 times he's interviewed him, has said "far worse things" than he's ever said on radio.

In Imus's view, Biden's "a moron" (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Story Balloon):

Were you, like me, surprised to see that Biden turned up at the beer fest? I hadn't picked up any prior indication he was going to be there.  To the contrary, check out what Pres. Obama said just before the event:

A short time earlier from the Oval Office, Obama had done what his aides had been doing for days: lowering expectations.

"I noticed this has been called the 'Beer Summit.' It's a clever term, but this is not a summit, guys," Obama told reporters. "This is three folks having a drink at the end of the day."

Vice-President Joe Biden, July 16, 2009. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Today Joe Biden was in Alexandria, VA, and said, as reported by CNS News:

People look at me and say, "What are you talking about, Joe? You're telling me we've got to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?" The answer is "Yes,"I'm tellin' ya.

Matt Drudge thinks this is news (link is to his time-stamped archive, which won't change); it is his top headline. Allah at Hot Air thinks it's news, as do many other center-right bloggers.

So did Sean Hannity tonight.

Anyone with a fifth-grade sense of journalism would know that Biden's statement is newsworthy.

The Associated Press reported on Biden's Alexandria appearance. Here are the first three paragraphs of the wire service's unbylined story:

On AOL Politics Daily, long-time White House reporter Carl Cannon bluntly declared that the political press gave Sarah Palin a raw deal in the 2008 campaign, and seriously failed to scrutinize Joe Biden, especially his fact-mangling and odd statements in the vice presidential debate. Cannon summed up:

In the 2008 election, we took sides, straight and simple, particularly with regard to the vice presidential race. I don't know that we played a decisive role in that campaign, and I'm not saying the better side lost. What I am saying is that we simply didn't hold Joe Biden to the same standard as Sarah Palin, and for me, the real loser in this sordid tale is my chosen profession.

Cannon suggested female journalists failed to make up for male sexism in Palin coverage because she didn’t match the kind of Hillary Clinton candidate they wanted to represent women in politics:

Joe Biden is coming to Cincinnati to tout the stimulus plan. A local TV station is thrilled.

If this is considered a good way to use stimulus money, we're in $800 billion worth of big trouble:

The entire nation is about to get a look at exactly how federal stimulus money is being spent in the Tri-State. Tomorrow morning, Vice-President Joe Biden will be in Northside to look at how that neighborhood and the city plan to use $1.6 million to help rehab the old American Can plant on Spring Grove Avenue. The huge building, which you can see from I-75, has been largely empty since the fifties, but not for much longer.

If you've even been in Northside, you've probably seen this building and wondered about it. Back in the days before aluminum cans, American Can made the machinery here that made the old pop cans in the days when cans had seams. Empty for decades, with a little luck, starting late this summer, this building's next life will get underway.

"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" That's a saying once bungled by President George W. Bush, to the loud delight of the liberal media. But that same media should keep it in mind as Washington mulls a second round of stimulus spending.

A July 7 Bloomberg story by Shamim Adam reported that Laura Tyson, an economic advisor to the Obama administration, had put forward the notion that the $787 billion approved in February was "a bit too small," and that government should consider a second stimulus package "focusing on infrastructure projects."

Although Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., maintains there is "no showing that a second stimulus is needed," other members, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in a July 7 Politico article, say it shouldn't be taken off the table.  

Why is CNBC's Rick Santelli one of the few press members willing to point out when the emperor isn't wearing any clothes?

As you ponder that important question, consider how Santelli on Tuesday morning recognized how absurd Vice President Joe Biden's Sunday comments were concerning the Obama administration misreading how bad the economy was.

After all, as Santelli marvelously asked: "How many hundreds of times has the current administration talked about the worst recession in history? The worst time since the Depression?" 

Exactly, but that wasn't all: 

When wind blew over a Teleprompter while he was addressing the commencement crowd at the Air Force Academy on May 27, 2009, VP Joe Biden joked: "What I am going to tell the president when I tell him his TelePrompTer is broken? What will he do then?'' (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

On Thursday's Beck program on FNC, actor Craig T. Nelson complained about excessive taxation and spending by the California state government, as well as the federal government, as he suggested that people should stop paying taxes to protest the government's handling of their money. Nelson: "If my children, my grandchildren, and my great grandchild who is about to be here, is not going to be educated properly, then I'm through with it, you know. I'm not going to spend money on these things that you're asking me to. Look, they should be allowed to go bankrupt. What happened to, we are a capitalistic society. Okay, I go into business, I don't make it, I go bankrupt. They're not going to bail me out."

Friday's Special Report with Bret Baier on FNC gave attention to Vice President Biden's tendency to commit gaffes, with the notably centrist Morton Kondracke of Roll Call commenting that "I say little prayers every day for the health of Barack Obama, who is a lot more intelligent than Joe Biden." Kondracke went on to give a negative assessment of the Vice President's Senate career: "For all the time that Joe Biden was in the Senate, he was wrong about practically every foreign policy issue that there was."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Fox All Stars segment from the Friday, May 22, Special Report with Bret Baier on FNC:

In a speech yesterday before lawmakers in Sarajevo, garrulous Vice President Joe Biden made yet another eyebrow-raising assertion: That he came under fire in Bosnia when visiting the country in 1993.

But New York Times reporter Nicholas Kulish didn't question Biden's claim (reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's debunked claim to coming under fire in Bosnia) in his Wednesday story on the vice president's visit to Sarajevo, "Biden Warns Bosnians About 'Old Patterns.'"

Mr. Biden has also been engaged on the Balkan issue since the early 1990s, when he was an outspoken advocate of the Bosnian cause. During his speech, Mr. Biden recalled his trip to the country in 1993, and how, flying in at the time, his plane was fired upon, and bombed-out homes with snipers inside could be seen.

Speaking of "old patterns" -- Biden sure got fired on a lot as a Democratic senator, didn't he? During the presidential campaign he claimed his helicopter was "forced down" in Afghanistan. (Turns out it was "forced down" by a snowstorm.)