You don’t often here a Senator say “crap.”

So when one does, it’s worth relaying exactly what Joe Biden said.

From the teleconference Biden and Carl Levin held on Friday previewing the Petraeus Iraq hearing:

QUESTION: Senator Biden, I hate to ask you a political question, but Senator McCain is probably going to have a big forum before yours as the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, and I wonder if there is any way, any thought on the Foreign Relations Committee to letting Senator Obama go ahead of seniority since otherwise he might be going in the middle of the night.

BIDEN: The biggest mistake we could make is politicizing, making this — looking at this in terms of political advantage — the American people are sick of this crap. And, you know, McCain is the ranking guy, so he’s going to get to speak first. And I think it’s good to hear what McCain has to say. I love the idea of McCain having to explain what’s going on here and why this is working so well.

But the idea here is, the last thing with — Carl and I are like broken records in our caucus on this — the last thing we should be doing is viewing this through a political prism. There’s nothing idealistic about that. There’s nothing noble about that. It’s just a practical fact of the matter.

This is life-and-death malarkey — this is life-and-death stuff that we get into the malarkey of talking about, you know, gaming out the politics of it.

Ah, malarkey.  That’s more like it.