The Gun Counter

Linkarooni

It's economy with the truth, stupid

Gerard Henderson
September 30, 2008

Just imagine what the sneering left intelligentsia, in the United States and elsewhere, would have said if a Republican vice-presidential candidate had told CBS News that "when the stockmarket crashed [in 1929], Franklin Roosevelt got on television" and informed Americans what had happened.

No doubt scores of left-liberal types would have lined-up to say the Republican Herbert Hoover, and not the Democrat Roosevelt, was in the White House when the Great Depression began, and regular TV broadcasting did not occur in the US until about 1941.

Yet the Democrat Joe Biden made these howlers in an interview with Katie Couric. She did not correct the vice-presidential candidate. This is the same Couric who grilled Sarah Palin in an interview which aired a few days later. The line of this interrogation turned on the thesis that the Governor of Alaska is not well enough informed to hold the second-highest office in the US.

More..............

I don't think Couric knew it herself.

Erik wrote:I don't think Couric knew it herself.

Yep. She just nodded her head and looked up at him like she was an obedient puppy.

Oh, you can pretty well bet that Katie Cupcake had no idea that Biden really screwed the pooch on that one. In fact, I would bet at least a paycheck that the people who edited that piece before it aired didn't know either. Let's be honest here - that was not some kind of live footage. Threre was any number of people who edited that and approved it before airing and they ALL dropped the ball. I can't believe that CBS is staffed with closet republicans who intentionally let that gaffe hit the air and let Biden end up looking like a dipshit.

One more thing. I haven't heard Biden try to explain himself on that one. These clowns always have an explaination for their stupid utterences. Campaign fatigue? Too many interviews that day? He was star struck being in Katie Cupcakes presence? He read it somewhere and was just repeating what he had read...not at all like his prior instances of plagiarism. Just curious.

This reminds me of Mark Steyn's quote of a very memorable suggestion for Bush (found on House of Eratosthenes)[edited to correct spelling & install link]:

By the way, my favorite repulse of the "Gotcha" technique was proposed by Andrew Ferguson (not available online) after Andy Hiller's famous interrogation of George W Bush in 2000:

Hiller asked him to name the new prime minister of India.

"The new prime minister of India is — no," Bush said. "Can you name the foreign minister of Mexico?"

"No, sir," Hiller replied. "But I would say I'm not running for president and I don't write foreign policy."

Upon hearing this weaselly dodge, which is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of gotcha, Bush should have switched fields, to Hiller's own area of expertise. "You're in television," Bush might have said. "Who played the professor on Gilligan's Island?"

That's ok, those who don't study history are doomed to replete it.