The meanspirited viciousness of the party of tolerance

Here is the videotape of Obama speaking of the 57 states of the Union.

Of course, anyone can make a passing misstatement when he’s been campaigning nonstop across the country for 15 months. Further, which I didn’t realize until a reader pointed it out (and I’ve since revised this post), Obama simply misspoke. Explaining to the audience that he was planning to visit the continental forty-eight states and had one left to go, he meant to say that he had so far visited “forty-seven states,” but he slipped and said “fifty-seven” instead. Entirely understandable. But Dan Quayle’s mistake of thinking potato was spelled as “potatoe” was also entirely understandable. The plural form of potato is “potatoes,” with the “e,” and thus it was an error that anyone could make, especially as Quayle was not asked to spell the word but rather was shown a card with the word printed on it with the incorrect spelling (which happened as a result of someone else’s mistake), and Quayle in the pressure of the moment took to be correct that which he had no reason to suspect was incorrect. The moral ugliness of liberalism is seen in the fact that Quayle’s error, which anyone could have made in similar circumstances, was used by the liberal media to humiliate and belittle him for years, turning him into a national laughingstock. If Quayle had spoken of “57 states,” the media would undoubtedly have torn him apart over that as well, not explaining the mistake, as I have done for Obama here. Yet the same media never mention appalling lapses of basic knowledge that have been shown time and again by Democrats.

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Anna writes:

You’re absolutely right, Mr. Auster. Watching the video you can hear him start to say fifty, then see his left hand subtracting the 3 states he hasn’t visited, and then saying only the “seven” resulting from that math. Fair is fair.

LA writes:

Rush Limbaugh said on air that Obama’s misstatement indicated that “He thinks there are 57 states.”

James W. writes:

You are not prepared to believe Obama does not know how many states there are. I am. There is nothing that he believes which is more substantial than the product of his own imagination. Economics, political science, foreign policy. We do not correct very pretty girls, or Magic Negroes.

LA replies:

For those readers, always present, who are ready to see white racism at this site, I would remind them that the phrase magic negro was popularized by the black filmmaker Spike Lee and has been written about in the liberal media.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 16, 2008 07:24 PM | Send