I noticed the following headline at Memeoradum this morning: Who is Dumber, Joe Biden or Barack Obama? The link was to Powerline, and I was curious as to the basis for the query. I expected something more than what I found.
The example for Biden:
one of Biden’s most famous moments of stupidity, when Biden declaimed on the “three-letter word: J-O-B-S.”
Hinderaker then notes a video (you can see it at the link) wherein Obama makes a reference to “three little words” and then quotes “made in the USA” which, clearly, is not a formulation made of three words.
One suspects, and it doesn’t take much charity to do so, that Obama was thinking “Made in America” as the three words in question, and yet the synonymous phrase “the USA” came out.
I find this kind of stuff increasingly silly and annoying. We are not talking here about an actual inability to count, but rather what amounts to verbal typos. As one who speaks for a living, I make of lot of those (and, likewise, make more than my share of the typed type as well).
Of course, Hinderaker makes it worse by going beyond just pretending like these are examples of potential ignorance, and makes it to passing “analysis”:
Maybe such blunders are insignificant. Then again, maybe they aren’t. If you can’t count to four, or keep track of the difference between 50 and 57 states, maybe that helps to explain why you don’t understand the significance of a $16 trillion debt. In a world where numbers are all just a fog, what’s the difference?
Yes, I am sure that that is what the problem is.
