STOCK-QUOTE-GATE!

I don't know what you think of Jimmy Hoffa's rhetoric over the weekend, but at least cut Joe Biden some slack:

Biden, whose mouth has long been a liability for Obama, was at an AFL-CIO rally when he told union members: "You are the only folks keeping the barbarians from the gates...the other side has declared war on labour's house."

...Hoffa's comments were much worse than Biden's, though the vice-president's demeanour suggests he could be a liability on the campaign trail (I'd wager there's a campaign plan for him to be used only in "rev up the base" type events). Put together, they are embarrassing enough to require an apology from Obama.

Apologize? For what? Where's the harm? I seem to recall that nobody got killed three years ago, during the 2008 campaign, when Biden said more or less the same thing:

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee sent out a story in today's Globe, highlighting Biden's support for trial lawyers, among the least popular groups with the public. The story reports, "At an intimate, $2 million fund-raiser put on by a group of trial lawyers in a private home in Washington, D.C. last week, he boasted that he had 'done more than any other senator' for trial lawyers. There are 'two groups that stand between us and the barbarians at the gate,' he professed. 'It's you and organized labor.'"

I think if the lawyers Biden spoke to in '08 had left that confab and gone rampaging through CEO neighborhoods breaking windows and beating corporate chieftains with two-by-fours, we'd have heard about it.

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(Oh, and if you think Biden was out of line praising trial lawyers, the alternative is Rick Perry-style "reform," and it's not pretty.)