The story has now hit the secular media. Last Saturday Time magazine asked: "Does Biden Have a Catholic Problem?" By Wednesday the issue had moved onto the front page of the New York Times. Joe the Jinx has blown it, big time. Biden has only himself to blame: he started this war, with his notoriously undisciplined mouth. He knew the dangers. Last August, Archbishop Raymond Burke, former Archbishop of St Louis and now Prefect of the Apostolic Segnatura in Rome, said communion should be denied to pro-abortion politicians "until they have reformed their lives".

Lanny Davis, Attorney and Democratic strategist:

Maybe the reason as to why in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression the Democrats have yet to stand for anything Big. The Democrats control a congress with no significant legislative record--not on Iraq, not on energy, not on health care, not on much of anything.

The Democratic National Committee leadership, when it speaks at all, speaks speaks with hyper-partisan rhetoric that turns off normal people and conveys no new important ideas. Democrats held a national convention and adopted a platform that virtually no one debated and virtually no one read, that checked virtually every box of special interests but offered no unifying vision of the Democratic Party, no Great Idea, no New Deal, Fair Deal, or New Frontier -- nothing, really, but party machinery, fund-raising capability, and the near absolute veto power of the special, narrow, ideological purity of the netroots left, reminiscent of the worst days of the McGovernistas of 1972. When the Democrats have no grand vision, the Republicans by default by comparison inevitably will look better, even though, absurdly, their only grand vision remains a now-thoroughly repudiated Herbert Hoover laissez fair economics.