Andrew Malcolm, Hack

Blog ››› ››› JAMISON FOSER

After two years of stupidly mocking Vice President Joe Biden for his supposedly light workload, Los Angeles Times blogger/former Republican operative Andrew Malcolm has had an abrupt change of heart: Now he suggests Biden is doing everything, so that he can portray President Obama as lazy and aloof.

What isn't Joe Biden in charge of these days?

For someone who was brought on board the presidential train in 2008 to lend some experienced gravitas to the ex-state senator savior's ticket and add a humorous effing gaffe here and there, the vice president seems to be running most everything these days for this Democratic White House.

Malcolm then rambles on, in typical Malcolm fashion, referring to Obama as "the Detached One" and posting photos of Obama talking on the telephone with his feet on his desk. It's run-of-the-mill Malcolm snark (which is to say: substance-free and barely coherent) except for the fact that it's the precise opposite of his prior mockery of Biden. And that's Andrew Malcolm in a nutshell: He's so fiercely devoted to mocking Democrats that he's willing to claim both that Joe Biden doesn't do anything and that he does everything.

Oh, there's one other demonstration of Malcolm's hackishness: Here's how he describes Jay Carney:

And then Biden's press secretary, Jay Carney, who used to work for a news weekly, facilitated Newsweek's cover story on how his boss was becoming so influential behind the scenes in the so-called Obama administration on crucial issues like Afghan strategy.

Actually, Carney was Biden's communications director, but factual errors are generally the least of Malcolm's sins. Notice how Malcolm suggests that Carney's prior "work for a news weekly" afforded him undue sway over Newsweek, which he used to win a cover story about his boss? Notice how Malcolm doesn't tell you which "news weekly" Carney used to work for? That's because it wasn't Newsweek -- it was Newsweek's decades-long rival, Time. That little detail rather undermines Malcolm's implication, doesn't it? Fortunately, Andrew Malcolm knows what to do with facts that undermine his innuendo: He omits them.

Los Angeles Times
Andrew Malcolm
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