Vice President Biden takes to the pages of today’s NYT, defending the administration’s stimulus spending. In doing so, he writes:

… the [Recovery Act] was intended to provide steady support for our economy over an extended period — not a jolt that would last only a few months.

Ed Morrissey, with a little help from others, jumps on this dismissal of “jolt” as a descriptor of the Recovery Act’s intent — and cites multiple prior instances when Biden and his boss affirmed “jolt” as the intent of the Recovery Act.

It took a handful of professional and citizen journalists a few minutes to catch this apparent act of double-defining. You would think Biden’s cadre of researchers and ghost writers — who presumably took several days to stitch together the VP’s op-ed — would be more capable, considering the time allowed them and their collective number of brains. You would think they could have identified this vulnerability in the text and employed alternative phrasing (e.g., “quick fix”) to make their point.

Granted, in the context of the op-ed, the use of the term “jolt” is defensible. The punctuation of the cited sentence does not place a period immediately after “jolt” but after its qualifying prhase: “that would last only a few months.”

In other words, Biden’s team could counter-argue (legitimately) that — consistent with the President’s and Vice President’s prior statements — the Recovery Act was, in fact, formulated to act as a jolt, albeit a jolt that would “provide steady support for our economy over an extended period” rather than a jolt that “would last only a few months.” Read that way, the use of “jolt” tracks with the larger tapestry of the op-ed, wherein Biden argues that “two-thirds of the Recovery Act” funds are being put into action “without red tape or delays,” while the other third will “create jobs today — and support economic growth for years to come.”

The problem with this explanation is that it will be ignored. In today’s instant-review, hyperpartisan, snap-judgment environment, very few people take time to fairly and fully consider context. Instead, many of Morrissey’s readers (both the regular and occasional) will follow the blogger’s lead on the parsed meme of a double-defined word and never take time to consider the entire op-ed. Biden’s team knows that, and because they know that, they should have also known better than to allow even a single, seemingly harmless four-letter word like “jolt” make the final, for-publication cut.

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Addendum: Upon considering this post, some readers will probably accuse me of being a shill or unabashed apologist for the Obama administration. Accordingly, for whatever it’s worth, despite my insistence on reading the Vice President’s defense of the Recovery Act in context, my professional experience (outside of blogging) leads me to believe too much of that Act’s funding is hobbled by unnecessary red tape (regardless of what the VP says) and that the entire stimulus exercise would have been far more effective — in both the short-term and long-term — had much more than a third of the allocated funds been directed to tax cuts and tax incentives, for both individuals and corporations. I’ve heard too many solid arguments on why “stimulus via tax policy” is far swifter and more certain than “stimulus via centralized granting.”