The Democrats "Whig" Out: Herb Tarlek

For those under thirty and those of the others who didn't watch much network TV in the late '70s/early '80s, Herb Tarlek (played by Frank Bonner) was the sleazy sales manager on WKRP in Cincinnati. He was the stereotypical used car salesman - loud suits, white shoes with matching belt, always hitting on the gorgeous receptionist, false bravado that does little to conceal a profoundly limited intellect. The term "all hat and no cattle" comes to mind.

With the exception of the wannabe womanizing (that's Uncle Teddy's gimmick), Herb Tarlek is what I think of when I hear Joe Biden.

All senators are overly impressed with their own mental acumen to some degree, but Biden takes it to another level. He thinks he's the smarest person in the room and also the best actor. He's the epitome of slumming hauteur. He does in several thousand words what John Kerry and John Edwards did during the '04 campaign when they and their wives pulled their Wendy's photo-op, threw their orders away once the cameras were turned off, and high-tailed it to the local yacht club for some lobster Newburg or crab salad or whatever the heck it was. He might as well bring a back fence, a portable grill complete with burgers and dogs to flip, and an apron saying, "Real cooks burn their meat!" as "Hey, I'm just a regular guy like you!" props.

Except he doesn't think that, and it's excruciatingly obvious to everybody but him. And a nominee like Judge Alito or Chief Justice Roberts, with their furnace of intellect, could utterly humiliate a blowhard like Slow Joe, except that it would be redundant. Because everybody in the room can see that he's humiliating himself (the hip waders for wading through the smarm should be a tip-off), even as he thinks he's putting over his "everyman" act.

You have to wonder what Judge Alito was thinking on Tuesday as he pried his eyelids open with alligator clamps during Senator Hairplugs' glomming of twenty-six of his allotted thirty minutes of questioning time. Well, okay, that's a pretty educated guess - "Doesn't his guy ever stop to breathe?" is probably close - but particularly when Biden took his crack at the CAP crap, during which he, well, crapped on Princeton University, Judge Alito's alma mater:

This is just by way of...you know, why some of us are puzzled, because if I was aware of it, and I didn't even like Princeton...No, I mean I really didn't like Princeton (laughing). Yeah, I was an Irish-Catholic kid who thought it hadn't changed like you concluded it had. I mean, I admit. I have little...you know, one of my real dilemmas is I have two kids who went to Ivy League schools. I'm not sure my grandfather, Finnegan, will ever forgive me for allowing that to happen. But all kidding aside, I wasn't a big Princeton fan.

Now that's odd, considering that not even two years ago in a speech at...Princeton University, he went out of his way to sound like an honorary Tiger:

It's an honor to be here. It would have even been a greater honor to have gone here. I have three children who have merifully have all finally completed undergraduate and graduate school, and I tried to get all three of them to apply here...I committed a serious mistake, Dean. I've learned now, any advice I give...when you become parents, whatever school you want your child to go to, don't mention it. And so I had been pushing Princeton, and this magnificently attractive, intellectually and physically, beautiful young girl, was a sophomore, was showing us around, and I figured we've got a lock now. My son is going to really be interested, and I know Senators aren't supposed to say things like that, but if he hadn't been interested, I would have been worried...

Did you catch the back-end backhandedness there? He puts over Princeton and then essentially says that he thought his son was sold because their guide was a hot chick.

But that isn't the punchline - this picture of Biden yesterday is. It's pandering so deafening that it makes it extraordinarily difficult not to believe that Slow Joe isn't just acting outrageously for his own amusement. As if he'd just come out and said, "Ya know, Judge, let's get down to brass tacks - I hate your stickin' guts, I don't think you should be judging wet t-shirt contests at Big Bob's Booby Hatch much less sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court, but we all know you're gonna be confirmed, so I'm just gonna be my jerky, pussbag self. Don't take my attempts to lay waste to your public reputation and good name personally. Hey, and did you notice the hat matched my shoes and belt?"

With all that as immediate background, did anybody take Biden's comments on this morning's Today show seriously?:

Supreme Court nominees are so mum about the major legal issues at their Senate confirmation hearings that the hearings serve little purpose and should probably be abandoned, Democratic Senator Joe Biden said Thursday.

"The system's kind of broken," said Biden, a member of the Judiciary Committee considering the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito.

"Nominees now, Democrat and Republican nominees, come before the United States Congress and resolve not to let the people know what they think about the important issues," such as a President's authority to go to war, said Biden.

Translation: Borking doesn't work anymore, dammit. But Lower, Slower Joe won't give up confirmation hearings. Where else, after all, could a tiresome old man maunder on ad nauseum like a pensioner on a park bench preaching to the pigeons - or one of those leisure suit/deep V-neck collar/gold medallion on hairy chest-wearing lounge lizards that have the rap until the first babe calls his bluff - be the center of national attention and get paid for it besides?

Herb Tarlek as Horatio Alger. Or Mr. Smith.

Only in America.

But Senator Hairplugs just sells the used cars. Uncle Teddy, um, takes them from there....