By now you no doubt have seen the video of the Vice President of the United States calling the manager of a yogurt shop a smart ass.  If you haven’t, click here.  Don’t read the article yet, just watch the video.

Imagine that you’re in Mr. Biden’s shoes for a minute.  You are constantly assaulted by the minority for the very nature of what you believe.  You are lampooned in the press for having a “salty” tongue.  And when you go out to local businesses, random people make hilarious (ie. lame) jokes about cutting taxes.  Imagine that this is your daily life, and has been for the three decades of public service you’ve been a part of, and seems to be getting worse and worse and more and more vitriolic by the day and you just want someone to say thanks once in a while instead of the constant harping on things with 0nly tiny bits of information and then they make some inane joke and you’ve had it.  You draw the line and say to yourself No.  That may be joke, but it isn’t funny and it isn’t accurate and what you’re advocating is lousy policy, not to mention, if I were to take you seriously, in the context, it is a little illegal, and certainly unethical.  I’m tired of this stuff. And so you say it.  You call the guy a smart ass.  You tell him he’s entitled to his opinion, but that doesn’t make it right.

The obnoxious thing is that this just goes right into the narrative that the public wants to write about him.  He has a “salty tongue” and is “gaffe-prone”.  A gaffe, of course is a mistake.  But what is the mistake?  What Mr. Biden said or that he said anything at all?  What he said was actually resonable and accurate: it was a smart ass joke and not helpful.  So is the mistake that he opened his mouth to tell him he was being a smart ass and unhelpful?  Let’s look inside our hearts and ask ourselves is that truly a mistake–to tell people they’re messing things up?  Would we call Jesus’s rebuke of Peter (“Get behind me, Satan”) a gaffe?  And since Jesus had a propensity for calling people out in public, despite the public’s expectations, does that mean he was gaffe-prone?

No, Mr. Biden is not Jesus.  I know that.  But he’s a devout Christian, as are many of his critics.  And as Christians, aren’t we (at least a little bit) to follow Jesus’s example?  Shouldn’t we call each other out when we’re screwing up?  We look at the situation and ‘expect more’ from our vice president, that he should be a smiley happy glad-hander.  But shouldn’t we turn our attention to the dude that made the bad joke?  Shouldn’t we want him to be corrected?  Shouldn’t we want to expect more from the public?  At the very least, can’t we expect better jokes?