Is it too late even to try to understand Joe Biden's calling a woman a "lying dog-faced pony soldier," or is this nothing but an absurd epitaph on a dead political campaign?

ADDED: Here's my reaction, and I have not looked at much of the commentary. I think Biden believes he's lovable, and he can kid in a silly way and people will know it's all in good fun. I don't know why he thinks he can swing around so freely when he's trying to gain the deep trust needed to be President, but I don't know why anyone pushing 80 thinks he can be President or why a grown man in politics thinks he can nuzzle and sniff at the hair of young girls other than to think he thinks he's Joe and everybody knows Joe. Joe is Joe.

That's all just pretty crazy but not all that different from Trump's confident barreling ahead, being himself. Maybe that just works. Many people get it. Some people. The only question is are there enough people who connect with that sort of thing. For Trump, there are. For Biden, maybe not, but what other path is there for Biden? Come on, people, get him — understand him the way he wants to be understood — as a fully competent, experienced politician who knows how to have fun with you lying dog-faced pony soldiers.

The only thing I'll add to that is I have and will have a special problem with "dog-faced" until Roseanne Barr is uncanceled. The greatest female comedian of all time was banished from her #1 TV show — had it snatched away and her brilliant character killed even after the actress was booted out — for the sin of comparing a woman to an animal. I was just looking at Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar speech, where he said, "I think that’s when we’re at our best: when we support each other. Not when we cancel each other out for our past mistakes."

BONUS: "Dog-faced" has its own entry in the (unlinkable) OED. The examples go back to 1607:

1607 E. Topsell Hist. Foure-footed Beastes 11 He describeth them to be blacke haird, Dog-faced, and like little men.
1663 J. Mayne tr. Lucian Part of Lucian 272 That ugly, Dogg faced Aegyptian...
2002 Vanity Fair (N.Y.) Oct. 332/1 Degas was not exaggerating when he revealed his dancers to have been a depressingly dog-faced bunch.

Here's that Vanity Fair article about Degas's unpleasant-looking ballerinas. Excerpt:

By the time Degas turned his attention to it, French ballet could hardly be considered an art form. This played into the artist’s hands. There were no great dancers to speak of... no great beauties. On the contrary, photographs confirm that Degas was not exaggerating when he revealed his dancers to have been a depressingly dog-faced bunch.... What he enjoyed was deploying dancers in choreographic patterns of his own contrivance. Ballet had sunk to the level of kitschy interludes in operas—interludes that allowed bored operagoers enticing glimpses of women’s usually concealed legs....

[Degas] wanted to portray his “little monkey girls” under stress, “cracking their joints” at the barre, as he said, their youthful spirits crushed, their muscles in agony, their feet raw and bleeding. Degas—a misogynist in a misogynistic society—equated dancers with animals, particularly the racehorses whose musculature he had painted so lovingly in earlier years. He confessed later in life, “I have perhaps too often considered woman as an animal,” and he told the painter Georges Jeanniot, “Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they can feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry, in the state of animals cleaning themselves.”...

Degas’s sexuality, or lack of it, has always been a bit of a mystery.... Van Gogh, whose work Degas admired and collected, came up with an explanation which tells us more about himself than Degas, but is nonetheless revealing. He put Degas’s “trouble having an erection” down to fears that sex might diminish his creative urge: “Degas lives like a little notary and does not love women because he knows that if he … spent a lot of time kissing them he would become mentally ill and inept.… Degas’s painting is vigorously masculine.… He looks at the human animals who are stronger than he is and [they] are kissing each other … and he paints them well, precisely because he himself is not at all pretentious about having erections.”