My wife is clean and articulate, too

Maybe Joe Biden should stick to plagiarizing the speeches of British Labor Party leaders. Because when it comes to making off-the-cuff remarks on national television, it's like watching a drunken high-wire walker.

Nobody in his or her right mind believes that Joe Biden, when he called Obama "a mainstream African-American who is articulate, bright, and clean,'' was, in effect, calling other African-Americans inarticulate, dumb and unhygienic. I believe Biden when he says he was using the word clean to mean "fresh and new.'' Except that we're still left with the problem of how it is that Biden thinks of Obama as a furniture polish. Maybe the senator from Illinois is "mint scented'' as well.

At the very least, Biden needs a thesaurus. It's probably too much to hope that he'll shut up once in a while. And while we're on the subject of Democrats with their feet in their mouths, can somebody tell them to lay off the jokes until they (a) figure out what's funny: see John Kerry's "stuck in Iraq'' crack, or (b) don't disown a funny joke: when Hillary denied that her "bad, evil men'' crack was obviously about Bill, denying it just looked like a failure of nerve.