It’s Father’s Day, and that means the Great White Republican Hierarchy in Washington smells burnt charcoal and is ready to barbecue some Democrats.

We all know Vice President Joe Biden as the street smart, wisecracking, blue-collared right hand of President Barack Obama. We all know the well-worn public persona: the dedicated family man who spent four hours a day during his Senate tenure shlepping to and from Wilmington, Delaware to be with his offspring, instead of shacking up with a group of fellow politicos in a deluxe Georgetown brownstone, going home on alternate weekends to gladhand with campaign donors. And yes, we all know Joe Biden as the GILF fantasy of women from Bangor to Bangalore, and probably in Europe, too. He’s approachable, he’s funny, he’s smart, he drives a white Trans Am, and he’s dead sexy. He’s Joe Biden.

But there’s so much we didn’t know about the current Veep…until now.

Good morning pups-o-fire! Pull up a chair this morning and let’s share a laugh. It’s established science that laughter has the ability to help heal physical wounds and ailments; but beyond that, it’s also wonderful at healing rifts between people. Everybody can remember getting over a huge altercation with somebody in their lives that was quickly forgiven over a shared belly laugh. I, myself, have ended arguments with a laugh over how silly the argument was.

I look upon Tom Frank as a political behaviorist with a healthy sense of the humor and an even healthier sense of the absurd, the latter of which works with the former the way an afterburner works on a fighter jet. His great gift is to look at us first, before getting around to looking at how we come to order ourselves in our society and govern ourselves in our politics, if it can even be said that we govern ourselves in our politics any more, which I would contend is a matter of some debate.

Anyway, to me, Tom’s great gift always has been to look at the influences behind millions of individual decisions that add up to the collective experience of at least the appearance of political self-government. Reading Tom’s work, and reading his assessment of the political malpractice we sometimes inflict on ourselves, I am reminded of an entry in the voluminous diary of Ignatius Donnelly, great American crank, former Minnesota congressman, virtual inventor of modern pseudo-science, creator of everything we think we know about Atlantis, and intellectual amanuensis of my own book, Idiot America. Once, while defending his own work, he wrote in his journal — “I believe I am right. Or, if not right, at least plausible.”

A Frontier Airlines flight from Denver to Detroit was taken to a “remote area of the airport” and searched for explosives. ABC reported “suspicious behavior,” which in fact was two people “making out” in the bathroom. The local ABC affiliate WXYZ in Detroit was more explicit: “The ABC News National Security team is telling Action News that their sources say the flight was disrupted by two people having intimate relations in one of the bathrooms.”

The FBI’s statement on all this covers up the fact that a couple Americans were trying to join the Mile High Club and that is why NORAD ended up scrambling F-16 jets to “shadow the flight until it landed.” The statement claims they were sent “out of an abundance of caution.”

I need a good laugh tonight. Could we just tell some jokes and whoop it up?

Happy End of The Canuckistan Olympics, everyone! And — you may now go back to loving San Francisco best of all the West Coast cities.