Was Joe Biden trolling Britain with his choice of poetry  or choosing his words perfectly?
Photograph: WPA/Getty Images  I woke up the other day to a load of Americans arguing in my Twitter feed about Joe Bidens speech to US air force personnel. The president, landing in Suffolk for the G7 summit being held in Cornwall, addressed the troops and their families stationed at RAF Mildenhall with a large number of thoughts. Lets recap: Yeatss poem Easter, 1916 is about the Easter rising and the violence that followed, starting with the execution of the Irish republican leaders for treason. One social media view was that the poem was about a load of things  there are also many animals in it, horses and moorhens and whatnot  so you couldnt call it explicitly anti-British. There was a cluster of opinions along the lines of: You know poets  theyre slippery fellows, never saying just one thing. And Yeats was the worst! He was a republican, but also very anti-bloodshed. Comme ci, comme a. Some people pointed out that Biden, with his proud Irish heritage, just liked its poetic tradition and the noises it made. And then, the counterpoint: Biden is nothing like his UK counterpart, who famously reached for the most insensitive lines imaginable on a foreign trip, reciting Kiplings paean to imperialism in a Myanmar temple. There is actual footage of Boris Johnson being told off by the British ambassador. Its hard to imagine Biden being told off even when he was at school. Another image that is hard to conjure: Biden just randomly Googling cool lines from Irish poems and picking his favourite. We probably have to assume that, in a break with the recent political tradition of his nation, he chooses his phrases judiciously, and with a purpose. So yes, world-class trolling.  Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist