This is the kind of thing that would usually take the form of writing an email — but now we have a blog!

Joe Biden is usually gaffe-tastic enough that it’s telling that Fox would need to go back more than a year to find ammo:

When Hillary Clinton told a tall tale about “landing under sniper fire” in Bosnia, she was accused of “inflating her war experience” by rival Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign.

But the campaign has been silent about Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, telling his own questionable story about being “shot at” in Iraq.

“Let’s start telling the truth,” Biden said during a presidential primary debate sponsored by YouTube last year. “Number one, you take all the troops out – you better have helicopters ready to take those 3,000 civilians inside the Green Zone, where I have been seven times and shot at. You better make sure you have protection for them, or let them die.”

So, when was that presidential primary debate? July 23rd, 2007.

Yet Andrew Sullivan says today:

Biden Was “Shot At” In Iraq?

30 Sep 2008 01:26 pm

No he wasn’t. He really needs to stop running his mouth off. It’s my big worry about Thursday night. If anyone can rescue the Palin farce, it’s Biden’s dumb-ass logorrhea.

Check the dates, Andrew!

Note, I worry just as much that Palin will get a Biden gaffe-gift in the debate. But I think that part of why Obama chose him was that Biden showed that he could be disciplined if he tries, and he’s done pretty well since he was selected. A few small ones, no biggies. Yet.

By the way, quite aside from how long ago it happened, it’s not completely clear that this is such a gaffe-y gaffe, either. The Hillary gaffe was a whopper because she was patently not in danger at the time. She brought her teenaged daughter and Sinbad with her for gosh sakes! When Biden was in Iraq, it was genuinely a dangerous place. And the Fox article doesn’t seem to really put the kibosh on the idea that there was some basis to the story:

The senior senator from Delaware went on to say that some sort of projectile “landed” outside a building in the Green Zone where he and another senator had spent the night during a visit in December 2005. The lawmakers were shaving in the morning when they felt the building shake, Biden said.

“No one got up and ran from the room-it wasn’t that kind of thing,” he told the Hill. “It’s not like I had someone holding a gun to my head.”