Vice President Joe Biden maybe be starting to throw in the towel a bit: The ostensible foreign-affairs heavyweight on the Obama team, the practiced diplomat, keeps saying impolitic things that are basically true. Over the weekend, he had to call both the president of Turkey and the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates to apologize for suggesting that their countries have been less than totally committed to weakening extremist elements in Syria.

The UAE, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, Biden told an audience at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, have been more interested in supporting the Sunni side of a sectarian conflict in Syria than in combating violent Islamic extremism. So, he said, they have “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad” while ”the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

This happens to be true — Arab funding and weapons going into Syria have frequently wound up with or been seized by extremists groups, the al-Qaeda branch al-Nusra and the Islamic State being the most infamous. To what extent funding from these countries’ governments has gone directly to these groups, we don’t know, but some of their citizens are clearly directly funding extremist groups, and the U.S.’s allies have not been terribly assiduous about stopping this flow. (The UAE has been tougher on militant Islam outside of Syria: It’s bombed extremist militias in Libya and backed the Egyptian government against the Muslim Brotherhood.)

Biden also apparently implied that Turkey has failed in controlling the flow of fighters into Syria, especially more extreme foreign jihadists — this is also accurate and a real problem for the United States. Of course, this isn’t a defense of Biden’s diplomatic wisdom. These were seriously dumb things to say, if the Obama administration’s policy is, not unreasonably, not to say them. But Biden isn’t spouting nonsense.

Less diplomatically dangerous but equally accurate was Biden’s other blunt remark at Harvard. When an audience member introduced himself as vice president of the college’s student government, Biden said, “Isn’t it a b****? I mean, excuse me, the vice-president thing?” He then kept blustering that he’d been joking, but no less an authority than John Adams, our first vice president, basically agreed, calling Biden’s job “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”