Joe "Brainiac" Biden, Landlord

Joe Biden is so unintelligent that he remained one of the poorest US Senators in modern history. Unlike most of his Democratic colleagues, he wasn't even smart enough to be a good crook. While many of them weren't rich when they came into the Senate chamber, they were when they left. But not old Joe. He's smart enough to call Tea Partiers "terrorists," but not smart enough to distinguish between a good investment and the old shell game.

However, since joining the Obamabiden Traveling Vaudeville act, Joe has learned a few things. After all, his partner knows how to work a good real estate deal. And unlike the case with his partner, Biden's real estate friends are not likely to end up in prison with Tony Rezko.

Now Joe isn't exactly getting rich off his current deal, but what can you expect. It's Joe. Yes, Joe has become a landlord. And his tenants are very handy to have around. The Vice President is, of course, protected by the Secret Service, which is a division of the Treasury Department. Joe heard the word "treasury" and decided to get a little money from it. A few thousand here, a few thousand there, and pretty soon you're talking semi-serious money. Since this past April, Joe has been renting a small cottage on his Wilmington, Delaware beachfront property to the men and women of the Secret Service who protect him.

The Secret Service is paying $2200.00 per month for the cottage. Actually, you are paying $2200.00 per month, but that's just a quibble. And besides, if this were Chuck Schumer or Dianne Feinstein who had become veep, the rent would be more like $22,000.00 per month. But Joe thinks small. He isn't even charging more for the cottage than he charged the former tenant. Or the tenant before that--his mother, who died in January of 2010.

One Vice President said of the vice presidency, "it isn't exactly a sin, but you wouldn't want your mother to know about it." Apparently, Joe and the Secret Service have the same attitude toward the rental. Even though the deal isn't illegal, there was no public disclosure about the deal until an investigative reporter was perusing Secret Service purchase orders under the Freedom of Information Act, and found a vendor named Joseph R, Biden, Jr. It is part of the mindset of the Obamabiden administration to be sneaky, hiding things that don't really need to be hidden. Honest Joe did declare the rental as income on his income taxes, though it took some further investigation to determine that the income declared on his 2011 taxes comes from the Secret Service.

This is not a true scandal, although it does seem terribly unseemly and perhaps a bit unethical. Another Vice President who was better at parlaying his position into big bucks might even have made the cottage available for free, since the Secret Service is on the property in the first place to protect him. But Joe doesn't have a lot of outside income, so he needed to earn a little here, a little there. And since it's the taxpayers' money, who cares?

If Joe can continue to rent the property to the Secret Service (ex-Veeps get Secret Service protection, too), he will make his first million off the property in just short of forty-five years. And it's better than trying to make a living off community organizing in Wilmington. So I'm sure Joe will be telling his show biz partner Barack "it's not a big f$#@ing deal."