◼ Gaffe, a word that temporarily came to be associated with political misstatements, has returned to its origins as a social faux pas, such as saying something at a dinner party that everyone knows to be true, but that know mustn't be said out loud. - Daniel Greenfield/Sultan Knish
...Did Obama skip presidential intelligence briefings on the most serious national security threats for a week before September 11? Did the Benghazi consulate lack basic security in a city where Islamist militias were running rampant and attacks on foreign diplomats had already taken place? Was the entire situation a result of an illegal war fought by Obama under false pretenses that armed Islamist militias and set them loose to persecute Libyan Sufis and seize half of Mali? Did Obama sleep through the beginning of the largest wave of attacks on America during his term while partying in Vegas?
Such inconvenient truths can only be met by accusing their teller of committing the horrible gaffe of politicizing the formerly apolitical and bipartisan arena of unilateral wars and the violence arising from them-- an area that the Democrats decided was off-limits ever since they stopped criticizing such wars and began fighting them four years ago.
Has the Israeli-Palestinian peace process dragged on for twenty years without a single gleam of hope? The official position is that the Israelis, who brought in Arafat from the cold, gave him a state and pleaded with him to make a deal, are to blame. The inconvenient truth is that Arafat and his cronies never stopped the terror because it was the only thing they knew how to do and it was the only reason that anyone gave them the time of day. And the inconvenient truth is another gaffe.
In a state of national and international disaster, the worst possible gaffe is telling the truth about the state of affairs we are in. These gaffes disturb the party-goers signing up to work for non-profits and watching cheerful reports about the Arab Spring and the economic recovery while the ship sinks around them. And the party men and women react to it with the outraged demeanor of spoiled children.
A gaffe occurs when Mitt Romney talks about a real problem. It's the real part, more than anything else, that is the problem. Reality has no place in the hysterical media feed from an imaginary world as unreal as anything that Communist apparatchiks or Nazi propagandists were broadcasting to their people in the dying days of their regimes....
The gaffe is that the emperor is naked. The gaffe is that the smartest man in America, the technocrat in chief, stumbles onto the Letterman set, which looks almost as fake as he does, and can't even name the size of the national debt. And who cares anyway except that it's big and getting bigger. No one is supposed to even bring that up, harsh the mellow and bring the party down. That's another gaffe right there.
