For as much as Joe Biden tried to go after Paul Ryan for supposed “loose talk” and blustering about a “bunch of stuff,” Biden really stuck his foot in his mouth — and then some — when he tried to parry Ryan’s accusations about the administration’s handling of additional security requests from Libya, he claiming that, “We did not know they wanted more security there.” …Uh huh. As Ed already handily summarized, according to a House hearing earlier this weekend, that seems to contradict testimony from the State Department, and even if it is true, that would reflect a disturbing level of incompetence on the part of the White House.

It was up to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney to spin that into something less damaging at the press briefing this morning, and the best he could come up with seems to be that Biden was merely speaking for the upper echelons of the White House and the president and himself personally; Biden clearly didn’t mean the entire administration, or something. Via BuzzFeed:

The vice president was speaking about himself and the president, and the White House. He was not referring to the administration, clearly, since there was a public hearing for four-and-a-half hours where it was discussed openly by individuals working at the State Department, requests that were made. Obviously, he was referring to, he wasn’t talking about the administration writ large, he was speaking about the president, himself, and the White House.

The only thing “obvious” to me is that the White House is still trying to defend their not-at-all-political continuing attempts to chalk the attacks up to outrage over a video when they clearly knew otherwise, and the “administration’s” ongoing inability to get their story straight. And even if the president and Biden himself didn’t know about it, so what? Obama has still put together an administration that can’t or won’t adequately deal with repeated security concerns. As Gingrich noted this morning, the American people would be forgiven for developing some trust issues here.