Tell them how you really feel:

I don’t mind stupid people. It’s stupid people who think they’re smart that aggravate me — which goes a long way toward explaining my profound and enduring antipathy to Vice President Joe Biden, the most vapid gasbag ever to hold the office.

Back when I was young and frisky and counsel to a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I routinely had to sit just a few feet behind and over from that insufferable blowhard. His chairmanship of Senate Judiciary was notable for two, and only two, things: his world-class logorrhea, and his serial character assassination of honorable men and women whose nominations he torpedoed for the crime of holding conservative convictions and taking the Constitution seriously. For someone with an intellect as shallow as Biden’s (76th out of 85 in his class at a law school that U.S. News ranks as 96th out of 200) — and who was a mendacious plagiarist to boot (see, e.g., Why Biden’s plagiarism shouldn’t be forgotten) — to question the qualifications and character of jurists like Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas required a veritable Everest of chutzpah.

In 2008, the mainstream media widely regarded Biden as adding “gravitas” to the Democratic ticket. Whether that says more about the shallowness of Barack Obama or the shallowness of his acolytes in the press is hard to say. Either way, I’m anticipating tonight’s debate with unseemly eagerness, indeed relish. Unlike Biden, Paul Ryan is a gentleman, so Slow Joe won’t get a taste of his own medicine. But next to the earnest, informed, disciplined, and precise Ryan, Biden can’t possibly go 90 minutes without exposing himself as a five-star buffoon.

I’ve got the popcorn popper ready.

[Update a while later]

“Joe just needs to be Joe.”

No worries, he’s not capable of being anyone smarter.

That’s what millions of voters have finally decided they want:

For the sake of metaphor, think of any friend who has called you and, after a tumultuous, but passionate, relationship, finally, finally, come to the realization that her husband isn’t the man she thought he was—at all.

It isn’t that her husband hasn’t failed her before; he has. But something happens to crystallize her intent to move on—a particularly harsh comment from him, a single and obvious lie (one too many). And when she announces she is leaving, and you hear resolve, rather than wistfulness, in her voice, you know she is not turning back. She isn’t making a show of packing her bags; she’s moving out.

Finally.

Well, millions of voters may now have packed their bags and moved out, after a whirlwind romance with President Obama and a relatively short marriage marred by unemployment, constant arguing, name-calling, signs he never much liked them, anyhow (at least not the patriotic ones), and one of those terrible nights (debate night) when (in those words that any man who has gravely disappointed a woman has heard) he “had nothing to say for himself.”

I never saw what they saw in him in the first place.

…is turning into a disaster:

This is something we see very rarely in our corrupt media, a backlash against an obvious attempt by the Obama campaign to create a distraction away from the big issues of the day. Obviously, in the face of falling poll numbers and Romney’s well-received foreign policy speech yesterday, Obama’s Media Palace Guards just don’t see “absurd” distractions as good strategy at the exact time Romney is looking more and more presidential.

Meanwhile, the people who run Sesame Street have demanded that the ad come down.

The Obama campaign seems to be in meltdown mode.

[Update a few minutes later]

“What does the media call a candidate who slams his opponent for dissing Big Bird and not appearing on Nickelodeon? ‘The adult in the room.’”

“nothing says “I’ve completely lost control of this narrative” like embracing…a seven-foot-tall yellow-feathered multi-millionaire.”

[Update mid afternoon]

National Review editors:

Those who point out that eliminating mere small-fry outlays like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting won’t balance the budget are undeniably correct — but it is also undeniably correct that we will not balance the budget without eliminating a lot of small-fry outlays like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. We have to do the big-ticket items and the little ones as well, lest we spare the taxpayer the guillotine only to abandon him to a death by a thousand forgone cuts. While Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are rolling out big ideas on taxes, entitlements, and deficits, Barack Obama is clinging to his toys like a frightened child, which very well may be what he is feeling like after his recent trip to the woodshed.

And Obama had it right four years ago:

“…if you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.”

It’s hard to get much smaller than this.

[Bumped]