Who won the smirking contest is not clear, but the VP clearly prevailed with split-screen tooth wattage while the GOP wannabe scored higher with tight-lipped disbelief.

CNN’s instant poll shows a virtual tie in voter reaction, a score that seems right to a New York Yankees fan who was sneaking peaks at the playoff with the Baltimore Orioles during the grin-a-thon.

Both games seemed interminable with little scoring but lots of huffing and puffing as the players pranced around ineffectually.

Joe Biden hit home early with a plaintive plea: “Stop talking about how you care about people. Show me something. Show me a policy. Show me a policy where you take responsibility.

“And, by the way, they talk about this Great Recession if it fell out of the sky, like, ‘Oh, my goodness, where did it come from?’ It came from this man voting to put two wars on a credit card…a prescription drug benefit on the credit card, a trillion-dollar tax cut for the very wealthy. I was there. I voted against them. I said, no, we can’t afford that.

“And now, all of a sudden, these guys are so seized with concern about the debt that they created.”

Paul Ryan touched all his rhetorical bases, flashing the headache-inducing Mittmatics that obscure economic issues and try to persuade the inattentive viewer that his plan to privatize and kill Social Security is really a brilliantly benign effort to save it.

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