Yes. Every minor verbal flub is jumped on as a major gaffe.
Those of us who recall the chaos of the spring of 1968 when RFK and MLK went down know America almost came apart at the seams.
Perfectly appropriate for Biden to say, “To understand how bad things can get, imagine Obama being assassinated.”
I was half a generation younger, in the middle of elementary school. There was a while when the idea of a charismatic politician not getting shot was the oddity.
What I found so offensive about Biden’s comment is that he spoke out loud about a possible event which we all feared. Illustrating a point, whatever his point was (we should not have to try and interpret everything a candidate says), by envoking the specter of an assassination of the 44th President goes well beyond the pale. In my opinion it reflects a mind incapable of the level of clear and compassionate thinking which the country needs.
Not only is this not a gaffe, it is a blatant attempt by media jackals to smear Biden with any kind of shit available. Notice that once again, they attack him not when Biden goes negative on Trump, but when he attempts to come up with something uplifting to appeal to voters’ better natures.
WISE UP, Biden campaign! Ditch the maudlin attempts at heartfelt soliloquies and fire away at Trump’s treasonous criminal behavior. We want to see you TAKE HIM DOWN, not smother him with sincerity.
Trump-Biden debates would certainly be entertaining. I might take my head out of the sand for a glimpse of that.
I don’t think of Biden’s comment as being a gaffe. I think of it as being another clumsy attempt to rap himself in Obama’s glow. Biden’t risks turning into a Democratic Rudy Giuliani. You know everything he says is “noun verb and Barack Obama.”
To win my support Joe needs to tell us what he is going to do the day after he wins the Presidency.
I am not a Biden supporter, but this seems to me quite a stretch to render as a gaffe. At worst, it is a bit tacky if he was suggesting that he was just one bullet away from being president, but he didn’t quite set it that way, and I don’t think we should really go out of our way to interpret such an intent. It must be a slow spot in the campaigns.
I’m sorry, but this is just dumb. He wasn’t saying it would have been a good thing or what an awesome president he would have been.
plagarism, or great minds?
on July 19, I wrote:
Who ever says “The vice president reminds me of Rudy Giuliani in 2016. But instead of ‘noun…verb…9/11’ its ‘noun…verb…Obama’. …
On the general topic, I believe this has been pretty definitively resolved.
At the end of the discussion of the general theory of crazification …
I don’t think I said Biden had “little regard for Obama”, just that there feels to be some subterfuge here between the two. I do understand the time context here, and think Biden was not clear in that. Thats all.
Not be Donald Trump at this point is good enough for me.
Although, have Donald Trump arrested is better.
the plural of “hero” is “heroes”
Great minds. Did you know that three different groups of scientists independently discovered the Higgs Boson about the same time?
Think about it for a bit longer and see if you hold the same opinion----The point is not what he was trying to say—there seems to be disagreement on that point—but the bottom line point is that it is never a good idea—in fact it is dangerous—to use assassination of a President as an example to make a point. The next President must be thoughtful and be able to express his/her thoughts clearly.
This assassination example disqualifies Biden on both counts.
“Dumb is not an argument”—You have to explain why you think it is a good idea for a Presidential candidate to use the idea of the assassination of the 44th President as a valid way to make a point—whatever the point might be.
The point was “assassinations are bad,” and since it’s (happily) been a long time since a major American politics figure was assassinated, he used an analogy about something that could have happened 10 years ago, but didn’t.
Yes, that could all be true. And, still it was a truly dumb thing to say. Do I really need a presidential candidate to tell me that assassinations are bad, or to sketch a hypothetical from recent history to make his point? Hell no. I bet that Obama doesn’t enjoy imagining what it would have been like if he had been assassinated. No matter how logical Biden’s thought process, he has demonstrated again that he lacks common sense sometimes. Is it Trumpian levels of clumsiness or inappropriateness? Of course not – not even in the same universe But it’s still not what I like hearing from any politician.
Minor point, but I don’t like how he starts by talking about political heroes, and then immediately veers into saying his dad was his hero. Really? You have to interrupt your flow of thought because you suddenly noticed that you said the word “hero” without mentioning dear old Dad? Yecch!
Yeah - although I’m in the well seasoned crowd, the first national tragedy that really hit me was Challenger - mostly because I knew (still do) people who worked at NASA. 9/11 comes next. Then the Columbia. I’m also gay - so the AIDS holocaust is an enduring mark on my life as I pretty much buried most of my friends from the 1980’s by the mid 1990’s.
If Biden wanted “the young people” to relate, his staff should have given him more relevant talking points.
