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Tag: gaffe

  • Joe Biden: Could We Get a President Gaffe?

    “An hour late? Oh, give me a f**king break!” –Joe Biden

    Anytime you bring up Joe Biden’s name, the first word out of the mouth of someone standing nearby is “gaffe”. In fact, before Biden got onto the Dem ticket in 2008, you could count on one hand the number of times you heard the word “gaffe” in a year. Now some people seem to think it is the Vice-President’s middle name.

    It’s kind of like how the term “white Ford Bronco” used to be innocuous back before O.J. Simpson. Now, if you say that phrase, everyone knows what you mean. Say the word “gaffe”, and people chuckle about Joe Biden.

    And Joe has it coming, to be honest, even he would probably admit that. This is the guy who once said to a man in a wheelchair, “Stand up, Chuck, let ’em see ya.”

    Then came his remark to an Indian-American man, “You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent…. I’m not joking.”

    The fact is, we live in an era when every sentence a politician says is recorded, scrutinized, and comes back to haunt him. This has even derailed otherwise promising political campaigns and whole careers. Remember “macaca?”

    George Allen was the U.S. Senator from Virginia, and was favored to win reelection in 2012 until this video hit the news and YouTube. His campaign suffered a blow that it never recovered from when the video of him referring to the man behind the camera, an Indian-America fellow, as “macaca”.

    Many speculated that Allen knew the pejorative use for the term — monkey, an insult to dark skinned-people — due to his mother’s heritage. In any case, it cost him a lot of time handling this embarrassment, and he lost his reelection bid in what was considered an easy battle. Such is the scrutiny of elected officials.

    Before Joe Biden was the ineffable Dan Quayle, VP to George H.W. Bush. Quayle’s greatest hits include:

    “Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here.”

    “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history… No, not our nation’s, but in World War II. I mean, we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century, but in this century’s history.”

    and, finally …

    “I made a misstatement and I stand by all my misstatements.”

    Some say that Joe Biden’s relaxed attitude toward precision and tendency to flub it up a bit every now and then would prevent folks from taking him seriously as a Presidential candidate in 2016.

    And others think that Biden does not stand a chance with a presumptive Hillary Clinton run.

    Americans have a sense of humor. We’ll see where they end up landing on Biden’s loose tongue issues.

    Image via YouTube

  • Asiana Name Gaffe: Frisco TV Station Takes Blame for Accidental Racism

    A few days ago, San Francisco Fox affiliate KTVU was feeling pretty good about its coverage of the Asiana plane crash on July 6. The TV station issued a web promo bragging about having been the first station with cross-platform news of the event, complete with “aerial shots from KTVU NewsChopper 2,” the “first with a live reporter from the scene,” and the “first live interview with anyone connected to someone on the flight.” The station was proud of “being 100% accurate, effectively using our great sources and social media without putting a single piece of erroneous information on our air.”

    Then came the noontime newscast on Friday.

    Anchor Tori Campbell reported that KTVU had just learned the names of four crewmembers on board Asiana flight 214: Captain Sum Ting Wong, Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk, and Bang Ding Ow.

    If you didn’t catch the problem, go back and read that list aloud.

    The prankster who fed this information to KTVU hasn’t yet been identified, but the station was quick to apologize for the mishap. After a commercial break, Campbell noted that the list was clearly erroneous and offered a mea culpa on behalf of the station not only for the offensive gaffe but for employing a room full of people too slow-witted to catch the problem before it went to air.

    Even so, the blame’s not all on KTVU. The names had actually been authenticated by the National Transportation Safety Board, though the NTSB has issued its own apology, noting that the list was vetted by a summer intern who exceeded the scope of his or her authority but was “acting in good faith and trying to be helpful.”

    Let’s hope that poor kid wasn’t expecting a killer letter of recommendation out of his summer internship.

  • Romney Etch-A-Sketch Moment May Come Back To Haunt Him

    Mitt Romney has run a pretty successful campaign so far, winning the Illinois primary just this week and getting official endorsement from Jeb Bush being some of the more recent highlights. He’s leading over the other candidates so far, although today he is traveling to Louisiana–where Santorum is a favorite–before their primary on Saturday.

    But it’s possible all that work could be unraveled with one comment, made to CNN by Romney’s campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom yesterday.

    “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign,” said Fehrnstrom. “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.”

    The comment was made in referral to Romney’s stance on the issues, which is already a matter of contention with Democrats, whose main issue with the candidate is that he is without core beliefs and changes them according to what will gain him the most voters. With this potentially damning gaffe, they now point out as an example for their argument that Romney has recently accused President Obama of wanting to see gasoline prices go up, yet in 2006 it was he who championed high gas prices and opposed a reduction in state gas taxes.

    Alex MacGillis of The New Republic had this to say:

    “Governor Romney responded to price spikes by describing them as the natural result of global market pressures and by calling for increases in fuel efficiency—the same approach that he now derides Obama for taking as president.”

    As for Romney himself, he says he doesn’t flip flop and isn’t planning on it in the future.

    “The issues I’m running on will be exactly the same. I’m running as a conservative Republican,” Romney said.

    (image)@ezraklein
    Ezra Klein    So how long till the first ad in which the frame is an etch-a-sketch and, with each shake, you see a clip of Romney contradicting himself?(image) 1 hour ago via web ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    (image)@jimgeraghty
    jimgeraghty    If Etch-a-Sketch sales boom in the coming weeks, it proves once and for all that Mitt Romney can, indeed, create jobs & prosperity.(image) 1 hour ago via TweetDeck ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    (image)@JohnFugelsang
    John Fugelsang    If I had to pick a Mitt Romney toy metaphor I wouldn’t have gone with etch-a-sketch; I’d have called him a Transformer.(image) 1 hour ago via Twitter for iPad ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto