Talk about putting your foot in your mouth…

Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

So Obama is the first mainstream black guy who is articulate?  Smart?  Not-dirty?  Attractive?

I don’t even know where to begin criticizing, except to point out that this country has had some very articulate, smart, clean (whatever that means) and nice-looking black leaders:

Martin Luther King, for instance, and Frederick Douglass.  That’s not an exhaustive list by any means, but you see my point.

Biden’s comments are just plain insulting, but don’t expect the media to be outraged.  Don’t expect his fellow Democrats to call him on them.  They didn’t care when Biden suggested that the Indians who live in his home state all work in convenience stores, and they didn’t care when he used the line “I’m from a slave state” to describe why conservative voters should like him.

But maybe I’m not getting what Biden meant.  Maybe he should tell us which black leaders, before Obama, were inarticulate, dumb, dirty and unattractive.  Some enterprising reporter should ask him that.  Preferably on camera.

Talk about pure television gold.

Trent Lott was driven out of his leadership role by the press for some benign and misunderstood comments about Strom Thurmond.  Tony Snow got raked over the coals for the innocent use of the term “tar baby.”  Yet Biden routinely uses insulting stereotypes and he gets a pass.

Liberal media bias?  What bias?

Update: Here’s the audio of Biden’s comments on Obama, along with this pro-Biden spin from the Observer:

As is often the case when Biden speaks his mind, there’s no shortage of material. In the story, we led with the fact that he savaged the Iraq plans of fellow Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, and that he did so in unusually personal terms.

We also noted that Biden chose to describe Obama using adjectives like “articulate” and “nice-looking,” to which a spokesman for Obama responded by saying that Biden’s words “speak for themselves.”

That was the part that Drudge picked up and ran with. There’s now a debate going on at Talking Points Memo about whether the addition of a comma before the word “who” in this sentence—“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” - would have affected its meaning.

I don’t think punctuation is the problem with Biden’s comments.  I think it’s the use of the words “first” and “mainstream.”  As though there haven’t been smart and articulate and, well, clean blacks in the mainstream of American politics until now.