Biden statement just now:

[Gothmog]

130. Joe Biden is a honestly decent human being

Link to tweet

Decorum seemed far from Biden’s mind when he went off-schedule to stop by the Cabinet Room on June 10, 2013. He slung an arm around my husband, who was about to be nominated by President Barack Obama as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; he hugged my in-laws, whom he had never met; and then he homed in on my kindergartner. The vice president sat down and whispered to my anxious kid about the small Schleich knight he was clutching. My son relaxed, and slumped back into Biden’s lap. At that point, an aide interrupted to say that Biden was overdue for a meeting with Kosovar Prime Minister Hashim Thaçi. Still, he refused to rush. He called over my daughter and his photographer for this photo:

Why am I telling another “Biden being Biden” story? Because I believe that the character of the person who occupies the Oval Office is of the utmost importance, and because I believe that Biden, far from a bad man, is an unusually good one.....

Biden’s disregard of this protocol is telling. He enters a room, just as he enters a debate about union rights or domestic violence, with a predisposition to lend an ear to the least powerful.

Judging from the reaction to the recent spate of Biden stories, time is up on avuncular attention, now interpreted as at best pernicious paternalism and at worst septuagenarian sexual harassment. In the cultural revolution under way in America, men like Biden are invited to offer their head if their prior actions deviated from the new norms.

No doubt, character counts. I, for one, admire Biden’s deviant decency.