I don’t really have a take on this. I just wanted to write that headline.

Aides to former President George W. Bush are challenging the veracity of Vice President Joe Biden’s claim this week of having privately castigated Bush, who does not remember the incident or an earlier episode in which Biden claims to have similarly rebuked Bush…

“I remember President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office,” Biden told CNN, “‘Well, Joe,’ he said, ‘I’m a leader.’ And I said: ‘Mr. President, turn and around look behind you. No one is following.'”

That exchange never took place, according to numerous Bush aides who also dispute a similar assertion by Biden in 2004, when the former senator from Delaware told scores of Democratic colleagues that he had challenged Bush’s moral certitude about the Iraq war during a private meeting in the Oval Office. Two years later, Biden repeated his story about dressing down the president.

“When I speak to the president – and I have had plenty of opportunity to be with the president, at least prior to the last election, a lot of hours alone with him. I mean, meaning me and his staff,” Biden said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” in April 2006. “And the president will say things to me, and I’ll literally turn to the president, say: ‘Mr. President, how can you say that, knowing you don’t know the facts?’ And he’ll look at me and he’ll say – my word – he’ll look at me and he’ll say: ‘My instincts.’ He said: ‘I have good instincts.’ I said: ‘Mr. President, your instincts aren’t good enough.'”

Follow the link for endless enjoyable snark (“The president would never sit through two hours of Joe Biden”) and a reminder of some of Greasy Joe’s greatest self-aggrandizing lies. My only quibble with the article is that it takes him seriously enough to hold him accountable. I watched the CNN interview the other day and simply assumed he was lying when he told the story about Bush and his alleged leadership quip. After a lifetime of gaffes and dissembling, how could anyone think otherwise? Even Obama doesn’t take him seriously.

Look on the bright side, though. At least he’s tucked away in a meaningless office like VP instead of an important one like Secretary of State. Whose current occupant, let it be noted, inexplicably cracks up at the thought of piracy.