Joseph Bottum examines Vice President Joseph Biden and sees “a walking pratfall, a clown of the tongue-tied, stumbling kind, and only the media’s determined effort to shield the Obama administration from laughter has kept Joe Biden’s miscues, misunderstandings, and mispronouncements from becoming our long-running national joke.” Come on, Jody, stop pulling your punches…

Everything you need to know about why you should not vote for Michele Bachmann. There is so much wrong with what she said, it redefines wrongness in all the wrong ways you can be wrong about being wrongheadedly wrong about wrongness. First of all, everyone knows the earthquake was because Lisa Cuddy will not be returning to House this season.

You know what’s even more wrong than how wrong Michele Bachmann is? That this film made $441 million worldwide. (And it was directed by a Hill Street Blues alumna.)

St. Narcissus, pray for us.

Al Sharpton says that MSNBC doesn’t need journalists after 5 pm. Unfortunately, it still needs them before 5 pm, a point that obviously eluded the minister without papers.

George Clooney will not — repeat, will not — be in the Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie, to be directed by Steven Soderbergh. Rumor is that either Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen, Will Ferrell, or that Rudd guy will play Napoleon Solo, with either Vince Vaughan, Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson or Jonah Hill as Ilya Kuryakin, and either Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, or Jon Voight as Alexander Waverly. The female lead will no doubt be either Anne Hathaway, Megan Fox, Jennifer Garner, Kate Bosworth, Rachel McAdams, Zooey Deschanel, or Maggie Gyllenhaal. The villain will be either Alan Rickman, Christoph Waltz, Hugo Weaving, or Cillian Murphy. And Steven Soderbergh will eventually be replaced by either JJ Abrams, Christopher Nolan, Jon Favreau, or Guy Ritchie. And the film will not be a big-screen version of Man from U.N.C.L.E. but an HBO series on the Franco-Prussian War, only set in space. And starring Bruce Willis. Or Liam Neeson. Or Viggo Mortensen.

So these “kids” — 23 and 20 — are suing Mom for inadequate birthday gifts and making them buckle up. You know, the kind of child abuse that sent Ivan Karamazov off the deep end.

As for model parents, this dad threw his 7-year-old overboard on a cruise ship: “The father hit him several times and then threatened to throw him overboard if he didn’t stop crying. … The crowd on the boat became very angry at the father for hitting the kid and extremely angry when he threw him overboard.” They became absolutely livid when the dad jumped into the ocean and tried feeding the boy to a Great White. Then they went absolutely psycho-batty when the dad followed the boy down the shark’s gullet to push him through the spiral valved intestines and out past the anal fin only to ground him for a week.

Speaking of sad clowns, have you been to the Museum of Bad Art? It should be on any adventurous tourist’s itinerary, assuming you stay at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast too. (Watch your head as you step inside…)

I leave you with a blast from the past: