Posted by
Bob Siegel on Saturday, February 06, 2010 3:29:55 PM
At a prayer breakfast, Obama kept mispronouncing the word corpsman by articulating it phonetically: corpse-man. He did it quite a few times.
Some Conservatives are jumping all over this like hungry lions who were just tossed red meat. How can our Commander-In -Chief mispronounce the very people who serve under him? For myself, I am willing to let this go. God knows I've done my share of mispronounced words.
My only concern here is a matter of consistency. When Dan Quayle misspelled the word potato, the media never let us hear the end of it and Quayle was ultimately unable to recover. To this day, people think of the man as quite stupid even though he was bright enough to graduate law school, serve in the National Guard, legislate as a senator, and fill the shoes of a Vice- President. In point of fact, Quayle used a correct alternative British spelling. And during that same election, Vice-Presidential hopeful, Al Gore reminded us that you can't make a leopard change his stripes. Didn't matter. The media was in the tank for Democrats. Democrats are allowed to make gaffs. Republicans are not. Such endless tele-barrage is quite effective. I remember one lady friend of mine explaining to me why she refused to vote for Dan Quayle. Now, mind you, this sweet, innocent female knew nothing about his policies, neither could she even explain the philosophical difference between a Republican and a Democrat. But one thing she did know for sure: Quayle could not spell potato. Even if that had been true,(which it wasn't) none of us ever mispell words? None of us ever make typos?
Obama's error was glaring inasmuch as he repeated the mispronunciation enough times to suggest an almost complete unfamiliarity with the word corpsman. I'm still willing to (as Democratic pundits, no doubt, will remind us ) "drop this trivial matter and just stick to the issues." Fine, my fellow pundits. Just make sure you do the same. You already destroyed one man's political future over a matter arguably less trivial.
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Bob Siegel is a political satirist and Christian apologist. He is also a
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01-31-2010