A little bit of Sunday morning schadenfreude for you in the form of Hillary Clinton’s running mate attempting to explain to Chuck Todd why the many times his prospective boss lied to the country she wasn’t really lying. Or if she was, it might have been a lie, but it wasn’t a lie lie. On Meet the Press, Chuck put the unavoidable question to Tim Kaine and, while he had clearly studied and memorized the talking points he’d been given, he still came off floundering like a carp tossed up on the dock. The video and transcript come to us from America Rising PAC.

TODD: “Let me ask you, Senator Kaine, she seems to be conflating what she said to the FBI and what she said to the American public. Can you conclude here whether or not Secretary Clinton lied to the American public about sending and receiving classified email?”

KAINE: “Chuck, let me say this: I’m going to jump to the punch line. I have heard Hillary Clinton say over and over again when I’ve been sitting next to her and when I’ve watched her on TV that with respect to the e-mails, I’ve made a mistake and I’ve learned something, and I wouldn’t do it again. And I’ve heard her apologize. I did hear that back and forth, and I think Chris Wallace and Hillary were sort of talking past each other last week. She was saying what Director Comey acknowledged to be true, that when she spoke to the FBI, when she was talking to the FBI, the FBI thought her answers in that setting were truthful. Chris might have been asking her a different question, but the bottom line is this, she made a mistake and she said over and over again: ‘I made a mistake and I’ve learned from it, and I’m going to fix it and I apologize for it.’”

What’s amusing to watch (in an admittedly mean spirited way) is the look on Kaine’s face as Chuck Todd makes his way through the lengthy set-up to the question. He knows the question is coming. He’s been briefed on what to say. But you can also tell that he’s unhappy with the only answer he’s been given and he looks like he just swallowed a dead toad while he’s waiting.

Also, notice the use of the phrase “sort of talking past each other” in reference to Clinton’s Fox interview where she “short circuited.” That’s exactly the phrase she used herself and I’ve seen it repeated by surrogates on an hourly basis since the initial interview aired. The current lie to explain the old lie was that she meant that Comey determined she was being “truthful” during her FBI interview. Of course, nobody is buying this story except those who were already going to vote for her come hell or high water, but that’s the way the game is played. Unfortunately, she keeps following it up by implying that those comments were consistent with what she told the American people.

I suppose that’s true also, providing your dictionary defines “consistent” as meaning exactly the opposite.