Word Salad
Before the phrase “Word Salad”, most nonsensical utterances from knaves and Knights or maidens and Dames, in today’s society were known as gibberish, unintelligible or meaningless speeches or writings. Given what the folks are subject to now from politicians and the media, there is a rich vein of examples to be mined.
No commentary about “word salads” would be complete if it didn’t start with the foremost purveyor of this nonsense, Vice President Kamala Harris. In only 18 months she has achieved legendary status as the prohibitive leader of this new form of blather.
At the ASEAN Summit on climate change, she uttered this gem, “We will work together, and will continue to work together, to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work..."
Her most recent salad is priceless, "Listen, women are getting pregnant every day in America, and this is a real issue.”. She was speaking to a group regarding the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion. Such sagacity and brilliance is hard to find.
Some may accuse President Biden of serving word salads to the Nation. Not Really. Joe’s gibberish would be more accurately defined as malaprops. A classic example of this came out during the State of the Union speech in February. “Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks, but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people.” Afterword, the White House issued a falsified tweet substituting “Ukrainian” for “Iranian”.
Biden is a well-known gaffe machine, so you won’t find him in line with Kamala at the word salad bar. In June, Biden got his countries mixed up during a NATO summit in Spain when he substituted Switzerland for Sweden when discussing new members in the alliance. This a constant occurrence for Joe when he reads the teleprompter with little or no beforehand preparation. When he’s off prompter, there’s no guarantee that he won’t mangle, confuse, or conflate the facts, leaving a classic “clean up on Aisle 4” for the White House media staff.
In the interest of fairness, all Presidents have verbally stepped in it. Bush famously called out to the Italian Prime Minister, “Amigo, amigo”. Spanish works well when in Italy. On Jay Leno’s show, Obama was asked about his bowling game, and he replied that it was like watching the Special Olympics because he was so bad. That took a while to walk back. Carter admitted in an interview that he “had lusted after women”. Shocking that a man would do such a thing.
“Doctors bury their mistakes. Lawyers lock theirs away. But reporters print theirs for the whole damn world to see.” A veteran reporter once stated this to colleague when he was upset over getting a story wrong. Sadly nowadays, the reportage the folks get from the print and broadcast media is full of written and spoken disingenuous word salads or gaffes that rarely get corrected. When was the last time a correction was issued by any media outlet over a report that something was partially or wholly wrong regarding a conservative? The progressive liberals are constantly getting shade thrown at them for their foibles by most media sources.
Small wonder that recent surveys find that trust in the media has reached an all-time low. While eager to document the gaffes and word salads of conservatives, they are reluctant to report the massive screw ups of the current Regime. Naturally that’s not a surprise, as it’s a known fact that most of the media news readers and scribes are liberals.
When a politician or a media personality creates a word salad or gaffe that is memorialized in video, that misstep will have a life that can be measured in light years. No amount of obfuscation will heal it.
Meanwhile, despite precautions, we can be assured that VP Harris will continue to serve the word salad of the day, and Joe will misread the teleprompter. The media, while ignoring the progressive liberal screw-ups, will hunt for conservative misstatements and happily report them.
Ah, for the days when a salad was a Cobb, Waldorf or Caesar and a “gaff” was a hook to lift a fish.