God love Joe Biden. Every time he opens his mouth, a gaffe of some dimension falls out of it, giving us a steady stream of material. In this clip, Biden makes a momentary mistake of bragging about cutting pay checks rather than payroll taxes, but makes the far bigger mistake of repeating ad nauseam about Porkulus critics, “What would they do?” At times, it almost seemed as though Joe broke TOTUS again and his text wouldn’t move.

Greta van Susteren asked Jim DeMint the same question, and got a very long and detailed answer:

“We introduced real options to this [Porkulus], and those options are on the table.”

DeMint does a good job of outlining some of those options, but the biggest gaffe from Biden is that no one bothered to ask that question in February. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid insisted on locking Republicans out of the process of creating the stimulus package. Republicans had offered a range of options, including backing another Democratic plan from Rep. Walt Minnick (D-ID), which stripped everything out of Porkulus except funds spent in 2009 — and it would have cost a sixth of Porkulus. START would have focused entirely on short-term stimulus and left out a generation of the Left’s pet projects and wasteful spending, including $300 million on golf carts.

Instead, the Obama administration backed the steamroller tactics of Pelosi and Reid — and America got flattened. Biden wants to know what else they could have done. They could have started by listening to Republicans when it counted, not just ask rhetorical questions to cover for Biden’s admitted misreading of the economy.