From the Morning Jolt for this Tuesday:

Biden Apparently Believes Obama Negotiates With Terrorists Now
Somewhere along the line, in our modern political discourse, “terrorist” became a synonym for “someone who won’t give me what I want.”
After the debt ceiling deal was struck, it took Vice President Joe Biden milliseconds and milliseconds to reinforce the suggestion that the administration and their allies are so morally myopic that they are almost genetically incapable of understanding what actually motivates the Tea Parties and others worried about runaway spending: “Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit, according to several sources in the room. Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting. “We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.” Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: ‘They have acted like terrorists.’”
If you ask me, this kind of runaway hyperbole… what’s the term I’m looking for? Ah yes! — water-boards the English language; torturing each word until it relents and gives up a strong-armed confession that the word means what the speaker wants it to mean, instead of the actual dictionary definition.
It says much about our times that expecting Biden to say, “you know, I understand you’re upset, but let’s have some perspective in here; your colleagues are not terrorists” is… just… too… much… to… ask.
But hey, of course he can say something like this. We’re an entire 41 days from the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. We don’t have to be sensitive about calling other Americans “terrorists” over disagreements on spending until, what, September 6th or so?
Matt Welch of Reason observes, “I’m sure that if Dick Cheney had used the phrase ‘terrorists’ to describe his domestic opponents we’d all just have a good laugh.”
Guy Benson notes, “Obama’s Arizona ‘civility speech’ is meaningless if his VP can call opponents terrorists.”
Then, of course, the walk-back; the retroactive insistence that Biden himself would never use that term to describe his political opponents, and that he himself thinks it’s inappropriate! “The Vice President told CBS News’ Scott Pelley, “”I did not use the terrorism word…What happened was there were some people who said they felt like they were being held hostage by terrorists. I never said that they were terrorists or weren’t terrorists, I just let them vent. I said, ‘Even if that were the case, what’s been happening when you now have taken and paid the debt and move that down so we can now discuss, the nuclear weapon’s been taken out of anyone’s hands.’”
Even in Biden’s version of events, he’s so stunned at how inappropriate the comparison is, that he just blindingly continues the metaphor by suggesting that they’re threatening to detonate a nuclear weapon. He didn’t call the Tea Parties terrorists, just crazy people who wanted to detonate a nuclear weapon. See? Completely different!