Sure, But We Never Had To Work For It Like That
Posted on April 7th, 2009 by Gavin M.
Shorter Cap’n Ed Morrissey:
- Bush often misspoke and critics called him an idiot, entitling us to a backsies reality: OMG, Obama’s ‘gaffes’ are actually bizarre falsehoods that he believes (new series; send ‘gaffes’).
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Two of the first three comments on HOT AIR
” You wonder how Obama every finished college. He keeps showing off a total lack of knowledge on subjects that a well educated high school student should know (I guess he was “road kill” for the teachers union).”
duff65 on April 6, 2009 at 3:12 PM
“I’ve wondered the same thing. How about “Affirmative Action”? That could account for some of his rise to power. Unfortunately for us the Peter Principle has failed when we needed it most.”
kanda on April 6, 2009 at 3:15 PM
Is today opposite day at Hot Air? If it is then Cap’n Ed is a very wise man.
kanda on April 6, 2009 at 3:15 PM
Teleprompter is so stoopid. LOL. How does he not know it’s Austrian German?
I am so stockpiling guns. ROFLMAO!!!!!
O.K., first reverse my last two lines. Goddamned hampsters!
Secondly, did Obama actually say that Austrian is a language? I didn’t play the video because the wife is asleep but nowhere does he have a quote. I will play it safe and call bullshit.
Thirdly, if POTUS = “roadkill for the teacher’s union” then I think the union is doing a bang up job God bless them.
Fourthly, wouldn’t you want the Peter Principle to fail at a time like this? I mean, otherwise we might have ended up with a guy like GWB as POTUS again or is that central to their point?
Fourthly, wouldn’t you want the Peter Principle to fail at a time like this? I mean, otherwise we might have ended up with a guy like GWB as POTUS again or is that central to their point?
Laurence J. Peter was referring to the inability of a bureaucracy to admit failure. GWB wasn’t ineptly appointed to his level of incompetence; he was repeatedly ‘catapulted’ beyond his level of incompetence by his influential family. Why do the J-Pod, J-Go, etc. crowd value and admire this? It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
Secondly, did Obama actually say that Austrian is a language?
Wikipedia’s resident linguists reckon that Austrian German differs enough from your standard Hochdeutsch to count as a separate language. It has its own dictionary, for instance — the Österreichisches Wörterbuch. Sounds like a grey area, like talking about ‘American’ rather than ‘American English’.
I wrote ‘grey’ there because I speak real English.
In Austrian German, a ‘Bimmler’ is a petty-minded functionary, intoxicated with trivial authority — the kind of guy who gets a real kick from ringing the bell on the tram at starts and stops.
Fair point tensor.
Ed, when Obama come out and says, “Those Austrian Linguist and their cunning plans…” you’ve got a Bushism.
“I can’t say that in Austrian” is only a gaffe to someone desperately unable to come up with anything else.
Now, now, just because we never had to work for it is no reason not to pitch in here.
Okay, here’s Cap’n Weenie’s message: “If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at obamaisms@edmorrissey.com with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism.”
So there you go, we’ve got the email address, no reason not to contribute. Obviously, I’ll be sending stuff in under my nom de guerre, Mustapha Vanc – and hoping Cap’n Ed will be as generous in thanking contributors as he is in deciding what counts as a gaffe.
More or less, yeah.
Nonono. The differences between American/English/Scottish/Irish/Aussie/Kiwi are primarily slight changes in pronunciation and a few different words and phrases. Unless someone has a really thick accent, it’s all mutually intelligible.
They don’t really rise to the level of different dialects, which is what regional differences in German are. Crank up the differences in spelling and pronunciation to 11, and you end up with crap like this (per Wikipedia):
And speakers of Hochdeutsch (northern Germans) generally won’t understand a goddamn word you’re saying.
Those Austrian plans and their cunning — What?
Austrian: S’ Boarische is a Grubbm vô Dialektn im Sü(i)dn vôm daitschn Språchraum.
You’re the expert, Till — but the Wikipedia entry distinguishes between “Austrian dialect(s)” such as that gibberish there, and “Standard Austrian German”. It’s the latter that the entry then compares and contrasts with “Standard German German”.
Nice work w/ the animated pine cones here.
I think, in light of this, the AmE/BrE analogy is better than he thought – General American and Received Pronunciation are pretty close, but get two people with little access to the wider world from, say, the Dakotas or Yorkshire (to say nothing of more extreme cases like Hawaii v. the Scottish Highlands) together and they’ll only understand three of every four words, and one not particularly well.
‘Mutual intelligibility’ simply describes cases where the rift in understanding is just small enough to bridge by context, but that’s highly variable.
Anyhow, given that previous tour’s stop in Germany which the American right evidently never heard of, no sirree bob, I’d say ‘Obama meant Austrian German’ is pretty credible. And this is yet another case of the right’s idiotic belief in reflexive political equality stinging them. Yeah, it’s possible Obama left Germany without a clear understanding of who speaks what where, but at least he wasn’t there angling for Angela Merkel’s phone number. I mean, Jesus Christ.
Does ordering orange juice for breakfast count as a gaffe? Because if it is I am totally sending it in.
Wait, it’s 6:45 in Washington, right? LATEST GAFFE: MORNING O’BONER DISAPPEARS AFTER VISIT TO HARDING URINAL – DEVELOPING
So they’re saying that this black man HAS to be inarticulate, that he only got as far as he did because of affirmative action? Nope, nothing racist there, nosirrebob.
Today’s gaffe: He’s half-colored.
Does ordering orange juice for breakfast count as a gaffe? Because if it is I am totally sending it in.
He had breakfast facing Mecca, so you know, there’s your gaffe with bonus wingnut FRUEDIAN SLIP ZOMG!!! pant-loading.
That’s the case for sending in anything and everything, for example, Obama said “is” and you know libbocommienazis won’t tell you what the meaning of is is. It doesn’t matter if we think it counts as a gaffe, the point is to have Capn Ed and friends decide to spend half a day figuring out if it is a gaffe.
Does ordering orange juice for breakfast count as a gaffe? Because if it is I am totally sending it in.
He had breakfast Facing Mecca, so there’s your bonus wingnut ZOMG FRUEDIAN SLIP pant-loading.
The point is not to worry about whether stuff counts as a gaffe (hey, Obama said “is”, does that mean he got a hummer?), the issue is to have Capn Ed and friends spend half a day deciding whether something is a gaffe. I figure planet wingnut is a system of incurable stupid, perhaps overloading it is as good an idea as ridiculing it.
Nonono. The differences between American/English/Scottish/Irish/Aussie/Kiwi are primarily slight changes in pronunciation and a few different words and phrases. Unless someone has a really thick accent, it’s all mutually intelligible.
Not sure about this. As a Scot, I do consider Scots to be a different language than English, although the difference between language and dialect it, I grant you, a very thin one. In my experience, Austrians do refer to their language as both German and Austrian. Chileans and Argentinians tend to refer to their languages as their own, rather than Spanish, which it essentially is. Where does Quebecois lie? Brazilian Portuguese? People from Bali get seriously worked up if you refer to their language as Bahasa Indonesian, which it kind of resembles?
its a toughie, but hardly a world shattering gaffe on Obama’s part, its hardly even a gaffe….
Oh, and ARSE, as in the Scottish vernacular….
Yup. You wonder ever day.
It isn’t racist because they are only talking about an individual, Obama, and not every black man they encounter…even though they do say the same thing about every black man they encounter but they know Thomas Sowell and so shut up, that’s why.
and ‘get it up ya’ WP
alec’s comment above made me think of a surefire way to get plenty of Obama “gaffes” into the not-brain of the repig loser who is looking for readers to send them in.
Just take one of the 4,885,632 gaffes that El Chimpo made while he was busy destroying America from 2001 to 2008, label them as being of Obama-origin, and send them in. Result? Snark fest!
Cap’n Ed Morrissey looks really smart in that shirt.
ZOMGitem #1: Obama uses split infinitive!11
ZOMGitem #2: Obama uses objective case personal pronoun when answering teh phone!1
I’ve always liked this tendency. There’s potential for a good, if racist, insult in accusing someone of skating through life on some manner of affirmative action (although if the particular kind of affirmative action happens to be your daddy’s name and bankroll, foul ball), but it’s just something they accuse black people of without understanding what it actually is or has to do with them.
‘Affirmative action’ and ‘black’ are progressive synonyms. Their use in increasingly close derisive contexts makes them synonymous in spite of having nothing intrinsic to do with each other. See also the last 20 years seeing ‘illegal immigrant’ (in addition to evolving down to a single syllable) gradually change in referents from a strict legal term to pretty much every brown person you’re not currently paying $2 an hour to clean the cheetos generic lotion, and mysterious dried spit out of your entertainment center.
Obama split an infinitive in Reno just to watch it die.
I forgot two things:
1) Rather like appeasement, the phrase ‘affirmative action’ has become an empty signifier for so long that nobody actually using the phrase could tell you what it actually involves.
2) M. Bouffant’s line: best Obama gaffe ever. I expect to see it on South Park in about a decade.
Have we seen that picture of Capt’n Ed before? Because it is priceless. It needs to stay around.
In this hive, I find the people strangely fantasied, possessed with rumors, full of idle dreams.
Reality check, guys:
Obama made a weird verbal gaffe. They happen all the time, to much smarter people than Mr. Obama. Not the end of the world. Acknowledge. Move on.
Instead we have a swarm of starry-eyed, bewitched liberals descending to claim that no, it wasn’t a gaffe at all because if you read it right and cock your head to one side and squint properly then he surely deliberately meant to refer to Austrian.
Next David Gergen will have an Op Ed saying that not only is that what Obama meant to do, but that it was a crafted, carefully orchestrated, sophisticated ploy to appeal to just the sort of person it would appeal to and by God isn’t it all a breath of fresh air?
Skip the gymnastics. Eschew the histrionics. The guy misspoke. Now get on with your lives.
Obama split an infinitive in Reno just to watch it die.
Ah, but did he do it to cruelly watch it die? To immorally watch it die? Fascistically? Homo-terroristically?
Ah, but did he do it to cruelly watch it die? To immorally watch it die? Fascistically? Homo-terroristically?
Limbaugh: “Halfricanly.”
Dittoheads: “So say we all!”
A bit off-topic, but good grief, what is it with all these wingnuts looking exactly like one another? With very few exceptions, they’ve all got the same body-shape, the same hairline, the same facial expression–which is to say, permanent outrage occasionally seasoned with disdain and always overlaid with stupidity–and they all wear, essentially, the same conservative vestments (Dockers or similar; a Brooks Brothers’ shirt, the tails of which they’ve tugged somewhat so the garment billows out at the waist to cover spare tires; wire-rimmed or rimless glasses). Sometimes they might mix things up a bit by sporting some sort of facial hair–probably to serve as a line of demarcation between face and neck, in case it’s hard to tell which is which–or adding a natty bow-tie or dashing set of suspenders, but jeeeez, Conservative Guys, you sure don’t give a card-carrying member of the Fashion Police (like me) very much to work with.
Hey, thanks whitey. Now go post that at Morrissey’s site.
Honus: Not worth the effort. Those people are too far gone to save. At least some of you people have potential.
Ich ein bein Weiner!
Hey! No reason to be hating on wire-rims.
No reason to be hating on wire-rims.
No hate! I wear ’em too, sometimes–just not with button-down shirts and suspenders or bow-ties. Or weird facial hair, heh.
Wingnuts:
The Rove Strategy- that is, when you make your opponent’s strength (in this case Obama’s skill at speaking) into a weakness- only works when you aren’t a hamfisted hackadoodle. Thus, Durrrr, Obama’s a big dummy! is effective on nobody.
It’s not so much the look as the noise they make. They heard all the GW bashing, but understood only the ooga-booga, the noise. So now they are chanting the same chant, trying the same things: “LOL, the prez is dumb!”, “OMG Fascist!”, and so on. But they missed the cognitive part where the faults laid at the president’s feet were based in reality.
It’s all sort of by-the-numbers. Lifeless, without insight or direction. Frankly boring.
No, really, convoluted explanations aside, the “gaffe” was no “gaffe”; I’m sure he said exactly what he wanted to say, and I’m sure it made sense to his audience. It wouldn’t be counted a gaffe at all, if wingnuts weren’t spinning so desperately.
Was Cap’n Ed the prototype for the banjo boy in “Deliverance”?
I don’t mean lookswise, I mean mentality.
Oh. Litbrit brought up a similar subject. I think we just answered each other’s questions with the “cousins marrying cousins” idear…
I hear Obama choked on a pretzel.
generally when a winger whines about “Affirmative Action” it means they saw a black man with a job better than being a janitor…
I had to go back and look this up to make sure I was getting the whole story about the supposed “gaffe”. So let me get this straight: He referred to the language spoken by Austrians as “Austrian”, rather than “a dialect of German”. That’s it? That’s all you got? Wow. I mean wow. After 8 years of the mangled, garbled, semi-literate rantings of an overprivileged, dry-drunk sociopath, this is the best you can come up with as an example of an Obama “gaffe”? Really? Dayum.
It’s not even a gaffe. As others have mentioned, German speakers do occasionally refer to Austrian German as simply Austrian.
The German Wikipedia sez:
Allow me to translate. “Austrian German (colloquially: Austrian)”
Whether or not Obama knew this is up for debate, but it’s not like his audience was shaking their heads thinking “what a dumbass” or anything.
I hear Obama pre-emptively invaded a country based on the belief that they had weapons of mass destruction and it turned out they didn’t! What a gaffe! LOL!!11!!
generally when a winger whines about “Affirmative Action” it means they saw a black man with a job better than
being a janitortheirs…Fixed that fer ya.
I hear Obama choked on a pretzel.
Ooh, and wait til the ‘nuts hear he threatened to put food on their families! And all his talk of making the pie higher is just about giving Cadillacs to welfare queens. TYPICAL.
After 9/11 Obama dared the Muslim world to “bring it on” with respect to attacking American interests at home and abroad. What a tool!!!
It’s not like he uses the non-word “nucular”
Shorter white knight:
It’s all sort of by-the-numbers. Lifeless, without insight or direction. Frankly boring.
Well yeah. “Obamaisms.” There’s no idea liberals have that conservatives will not steal 8 years later and present as fresh.
He said he was a jelly donut! HAW HAW HAW
Wow. I mean wow. After 8 years of the mangled, garbled, semi-literate rantings of an overprivileged, dry-drunk sociopath, this is the best you can come up with as an example of an Obama “gaffe”? Really? Dayum.
Yup. It would be like Putin coming here and talking “American”.
We’d probably figure he meant it as a compliment, even though he’d be pretty accurate.
I like to point this out when it comes up: ‘nucular’ is a legitimate vernacular feature. The man who dropped the bomb on Japan used it; it is (or at least was, before it got unfashionable) used by nuclear physicists from the right parts of the South.
Bush might have affected it – it’s common to Texas, and ‘Bush pretends to be a Texan’ is only three-quarters right – but my favorite feature of the 2008 election by far was Sarah Palin, who was educated in the Pacific Northwest, worked in a field where General American was a hiring requirement, and inhabits an area with a dialect somewhere between Iowa’s and British Columbia’s, using ‘nucular’ to sound just like those precious Southron mouth-breathers.
‘I’m a jan-yoo-wine Amurkin, just like y’all ree-tees!’ That was the Republican campaign boiled down to a single sentence. It was best, as in the case of Palin, where the patronizing idiot routine was delivered by someone who was legitimately stupid and incurious without being an ignorant hick. So you’re not just being condescended to, you’re being condescended to by a fucking moron.
“Instead we have a swarm of starry-eyed, bewitched liberals descending to claim that no, it wasn’t a gaffe at all because if you read it right and cock your head to one side and squint properly then he surely deliberately meant to refer to Austrian.”
Yes, White Knight. Exactly.
(What the…???)
That’s another reason why the Mooseburger candidacy was so delicious. Imagine her inner monologue:
“I got me a degree from one of those fancy learning places. You dumb hicks probably didn’t graduate high school. I don’t mind lying to you since you’re all so stupid.”
I’m reminded of an old Beavis & Butt-head cartoon where they’re on the couch watching Jeopardy:
Trebek: “I’m sorry, that is incorrect. The answer is actually OUTER Mongolia.”
Butt-head: “Huh huh huh. Dumbass!”
Skip the gymnastics. Eschew the histrionics. The guy misspoke. Now get on with your lives.
Actually, Whitey, I think this post is more about the histrionics of Ed Morrissey, and us making fun of the attempt to turn a gaffe into an impeachable offense.
It’s already been pointed out by several commentors, but it bears repeating: they are merely parroting the insults that were leveled at Bush. That’s it. Context does not matter.
I know this isn’t exactly news, but the rightwing blogosphere is operating at a very low cognitive level.
From the Department of Playing Both Sides of the Street:
When Austrians do it–and if it helps to make a negative point about Hussein X–being multilingual is “intelligent and cultured.”
When Americans do it, then it’s, “Gaahhh!! Teh Evilll! Mexislahomofascists are not even lerning the langwich!”
Are these people not even trying for a pretense of consistency any more?
Yes, White Knight. Exactly.
Conservatives do not like it when you have to recognize any nuance whatsoever. If it’s not already in their sphere of experience, it’s wild-eyed bullshit no one takes seriously.
For some reason, German is a language full of kultur and Spanisch is not so much. I wonder.
Do you remember recently when the meme sweeping Right Blogistan was that the very idea of speaking a language in addition to English was pussified and un-American?
I’ve never believed this is genuine. It just seems so obviously bankrupt that the only way it parses is as a crass bit of anti-latino FUD, and a way for the intellectuals who hold them in contempt to try and feed red meat to the Base while reminding them who the real enemy is: coloreds.
If, sometime in the future, it develops that Obama thinks they speak Spanish in Brazil, or that Finnish is a Scandinavian language, I’ll call him an idiot with the best of them. Until then, STFU already!
If it’s okay to say “nucular,” then it’s okay to say “supposably.”
This uproar reminds me of when Vice President Biden said “Bosniaks,” because he totally made that word up and he’s so stoooopid and–nevermind.
The only thing that would make that photo of Morrissey even more hilarious would be a horizontal-striped shirt.