Posted by pythrr on 2012-10-18 03:48:10

A grammatical slip becomes headline of day.

This is how banal the state of US political commentary has become. Meat for babes and morons.

Posted by Balle2000 on 2012-10-18 04:20:34

It's all about the Freudian slips

Posted by Timlagor on 2012-10-18 04:36:08

Well now you've gone and prompted me to find out what on earth you're on about.

Posted by Jeffro on 2012-10-18 07:17:29

http://imgace.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/did-someone-say-binders-full-of-women.jpg

Posted by PsyPhiGrad on 2012-10-18 08:35:44

It's not the awkward phrasing that should concern you. It's the pathological lying that should disturb people more. Not like it's any better in Canada. We have a government that lives in a fact-free environment. It's gotten so bad that scientists have started protesting on Parliament Hill.

Posted by selfy_74 on 2012-10-18 13:35:20

Show me a government that doesn't pathologically lie!

Posted by boruppeter on 2012-10-18 16:45:05

The German government doesn't pathologically lie! Conceded, that's because the three involved political parties cannot agree on what opinion they should have, so they don't do this governing the county thing anymore, but still, they don't lie atm...

Posted by JackassRampant on 2012-10-18 18:44:59

Politics is funny. Mitt Romney has serious policy malfunctions, and we wait until he makes a silly gaffe that seems somehow fitting in the context of said malfunctions to jump on him. People aren't actually criticizing him for misusing English so much as for being tin-eared toward people who are not like him (in this case women), but that's how the criticism is phrased, because ... because that's how politics works.

Posted by fidius on 2012-10-18 19:49:26

Jeffro, lol -- I was just about to link that pic. The truth (as I see it) is that BO and his administration know that certain types of people respond to emotional arguments. Also, factual assertions are harder to explain. So their strategy is to tug at your heartstrings whenever possible, eg. class (Romney is rich and you're not), race (charges of bigotry and racial codewords), sex ("binders of women"), and any other category they can think of. Policy can be debated (personally I think "give poor people more money" is not a policy but I'm open to argument), but emotional appeals have the beauty of being easy to soundbite, and don't require any thought or explanation. And they work on a lot of people.

Posted by pythrr on 2012-10-18 20:33:19

JackAss - CORRECT!

Political commentary is banal, speaking to the lowest common denominator, and in the USA, that is pretty damn common....

Posted by JackassRampant on 2012-10-19 15:59:41

Actually, pythrr, I think the criticism is legitimate. It's not, "Mitt said something silly!" but rather, "Mitt seems to hold a worldview that is incompatible with good governance, and this silly slip of the tongue is demonstrative of this."

"Binders full of women" makes a handy shorthand stand-in for a lot of the basic anti-Romney arguments, such as:
* Romney belongs to this old-boy network that has ruthlessly excluded everyone but wealthy white men from its privileged ranks;
* Romney doesn't understand women, doesn't know successful women, and therefore doesn't care about women or their careers;
* Romney thinks people can be put in binders, or rather, is willing to conflate a dossier on a person with that person. Or rather still, doesn't have any empathy, and sees value in terms of dollars, not lives.
* Romney will say stupid things in public. Remember who else had a tendency to stick his foot in it? Yeah, so do I. You wouldn't vote for that guy again, right? Or as he put it, "fool me twice, won't get fooled again." This guy is like that guy.

So it's more like a convenient shorthand than a "gotcha" over silly phrasing.