Posted by JumpyPants
Karl Rove must spend forty-minutes on the toilet every morning figuring out how to hogtie the words "gaffe" and "Biden" together. I saw Bush's Retarded Brain the other night on that Fox show with Skiper Hannity and his li'l buddy Gilligan Colmes, and Rove actually predicted Palin would win the VP debate because of "Joe 'Gaffe' Biden and all his gaffes he'll be making when he talks, which he can't do without making a gaffe. Gaffe. Biden. [snorting noise]"
And, you know what? Joe Biden has made some famous gaffes.
So but what is a gaffe? According to Merriam-Webster, a gaffe is:
1 : a social or diplomatic blunder or 2 : a noticeable mistake
So it was in the context of this gaffe-talk that I saw this piece from Howard Kurtz via HuffPost. The piece's headline was "LATEST PALIN GAFFE" and it describes the fact that in a yet unseen clip from Palin's seemingly endless Katie Couric interview, Palin cannot name a single supreme court ruling other than, of course, Roe v. Wade.
A Palin aide is infuriated ("infuriated"!) about this. (Not infuriated that his/her boss is a complete ignoramus, infuriated that CBS is revealing the fact that his/her boss is a complete ignoramus). Here's the quote, and note the use of the well-worn term "gaffe":
The Palin aide, after first noting how "infuriating" it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions.
So this is Kurtz, by the way, writing about Palin's "gaffe". But is it a social/diplomatic blunder to not know more than one Supreme Court ruling? Is it a noticeable mistake (beyond the context of it being a mistake for someone running for the second highest office in a branch of the federal government that abuts the Supreme Court to admit that they know next to nothing of the work of said Court)? Well, the amazing thing is, Mr. Kurtz even goes on to explain that it was nothing of the kind:
After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases.
There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.
So, no verbal fumbling. In other words, neither a blunder or a mistake. Just plain fucking shameless ignorance from a remarkable dumbass, put forth by the current party in power to be one 72-year old cancer victim's heartbeat away from running the whole big show. Said nomination of Palin, by the way, is one gigantic fucking gaffe.