Everyone seems to be all up in arms today about something Senator Joe Biden (D-MBNA) said recently when describing Senator Obama. Frequent commenter WKMaier brought this matter to my attention as a comment on another post.

This appears to be the actual quote:

"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."

I had just seen the quote for the first time minutes before when I’d read Michael Crowley’s rather foolishly short commentary at The Plank blog at The New Republic Online.

What Senator Biden apparently said was pretty simple in my mind. He was trying to be graciously complimentary. I focused on the word “clean” and felt he meant “clean cut”. With the aid of the always-useful second thought I think he also meant clean as in the sense of “free of baggage,” most especially so after CNN committed journalism and put Fox Noise Channel’s attempted madrassa slur to bed. It’s important to remember that Senator Biden was speaking extemporaneously, and everyone fluffs now and again..

There have been other mainstream African-Americans with highly visible profiles in national politics. Not necessarily as national candidates, mind you, but as interviewees and pundits/opinion makers. Because they are African-Americans, any discussion of their positive and negative qualities is fraught with peril because race is still a tremendously divisive issue in this country. One can’t always discuss these qualities casually because Americans tend to be careless and imprecise in our language. We are apparently in the official 2008 Presidential campaign season, 16 months ahead of time, because our broken media is unwilling or too frightened to take up the real issues confronting our nation’s survival as a democracy.

Just as any criticism of Israel brings immediate accusations of anti-Semitism, so does any criticism of African-Americans bring an instant challenge of racial prejudice. I’m not inferring some Americans are not prejudiced against blacks, because there are many. I take the point, however, that most of them are on the other side of the fence.

Language, words, has meaning, and can be an arrow, striking deep in the heart of its target, or it can be a boomerang, circling back to strike the speaker. In 21st Century America, only Democrats are held to a standard of accuracy in thought and language, so it appears the media, and the blogospere has ruled Senator Biden out of bounds.

Garance Franke-Ruta has a good take on the real meaning of Senator Biden’s comment here, while addressing the whole politically correct demands of a society divided against itself. And Josh Marshall has five articles on the topic here, and a clarification from Senator Biden’s office and a partial transcript of an interview with Diane Sawyer explaining exactly what he meant here. I deeply respect Steve Gilliard and he took offense at this, also.

Now, as I said, I understood what he meant the second I saw his words, and I’m sure many if not most Americans understood it as I did. I’m certainly not trying to defend Senator Biden, but I do understand he misspoke. It happens sometimes, when people speak in public.

But as long as our media is owned and controlled by the anti-Democratic party it, as well as the yapping dogs of the right blogosphere. will exploit every misstep, each mangled sentence construction, every garbled word, to pummel us.

It just seems unfortunate to me that those of us who are oxygen breathers have to spend so much productive time enabling their efforts to destroy our society.