Some Gaffes Aren’t Gaffes

When you carefully read from prepared remarks to state a belief you and many other congressman share (and are privately unrepentant about), it’s not a gaffe. And it certainly doesn’t compare to anything the Vice President may have said, most often as a joke.

I mean, technically, a gaffe is synonymous with a mistake, so I suppose they are right. But more generically, a gaffe has been used to reference a blooper, a foolish slip up, and usually referred to in politics as an impromptu moment of unscripted remarks (i.e. candor).

What Barton said was not an impromptu apology, and shouldn’t be treated as an off-the-cuff statement or a freudian slip of the tongue. He meant it and only apologized because it was politically necessary.

I’m tired of politicians saying what they really mean, realizing their mistake, “apologizing, and the media giddishly accepting it at face value before moving on. Not everything should be dismissed lightly as a gaffe.

When the top Republican on the Energy committee reads from prepared remarks in order to apologize to a foreign company with a long history of safety violations for having been made to compensate fellow Americans for the worst environmental disaster in our history – that’s not a childish mistake we can laugh at and forget.

D.C. may be a small town for the elites who mingle at A-list events. But the crap these career politicians do and say in our name have an impact, and can’t always be easily dismissed with the swiftness of a child with ADHD.

Sometimes you have to stop in awe of the insensitivity of those in power and the media who enable them.