Who Put the "Vice" in President?

Weird. Just weird. Well, and very disturbing.

Leaving Clinton aside for the most part, I'm actually addressing Vice Presidents, or candidates for such. Our present one is relatively harmless in spite of his big mouth which sometimes even has a "potty" component. But, certainly harmless when compared to Uncle Dick.

What prompted this is the realization of how bad some of the candidates for Vice President have been in recent years. The Right is finally realizing that with 2/3-Governor Palin. And those of us who never liked her and saw right through the pageant queen of the McCain roll-out are biting our tongues so we don't say, "We told you so." (oops. I slipped).


Yet she wasn't the only one! I mean, I'll readily confess that I was wrong to ever support John Edwards. He seemed liked an energetic and capable proponent for the common man having brought himself up by his bootstraps through the textile mills then the mills of the legal profession. And I trusted Elizabeth if she trusted him. That all went so very, very bad.

And there was Joe Lieberman too! I mean, what a piece of work! Everybody's favorite liberal then he went wacko for McCain on fighting Muslims. Kicked out of his party, he still won and sort of came back. But who would trust him? And for what? The worst mistake of the last ten years was the Iraq War and he was cheerleader number 1 (well, at least 3 or 4).

Al Gore was one of the best VP's in all of US History - a true partner with his President. And, believe it or not, I saw it first hand from inside, he was very successful in diminishing the size of the federal government both in personnel and in throwing out regs and policies. It got a little difficult there for a while, in some ways still is, because old policy manuals we used to follow for guidance simply disappeared.

Then something went wrong with him too. I'm not talking about his passion for saving our environment. That was generally a good thing. But he lost that election in the Supreme Court when he had won a popular vote victory, probably even in Florida but certainly nationwide. He was so close to being President and he had walked such a fine line after all his loyalty to Clinton in good government, he justifiably wanted to be separated from the sleaze. After his loss, he  grew a beard, then porked out, and then somehow lost the best part of who he was - Tipper. That's sad.

It was FDR's first VP, John Nance Garner, who supposedly said, "the Vice Presidency isn't worth a pitcher of warm spit." Even if some aren't sure he wasn't referring to something other than spit, it may not just be the office but the candidates themselves.