By Selwyn Duke
Everyone who isn’t like Obama (i.e., uninformed) knows about Obama’s not-too-uncommon malapropisms and mistakes, such as when he pronounced “corpsman” “corpse-man” — three times in one speech. Early this year, the president called Oklahoma’s Choctaw Nation the “Cock-taw” Nation. And more recently, he mispronounced Ebola “Ebolee” during an October 2 speech in Illinois. Yup, don’t wanna catch that there Ebolee. That’d done be the death a’ yous guys.
Some will say here that anyone can make a mistake, that focusing on such gaffes is petty and unfair. But note the standard that has been established: One poorly timed moment of brain freeze scuttled Governor Rick Perry’s 2012 presidential aspirations. Sarah Palin was classified an airhead for, at least partially, something actually said by comedienne Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live. And “potatoe” was enough to do in former vice president Dan Quayle. The last example is especially apropos given that Obama would get (until recently, anyway) tremendous “r-s-p-e-c-t” — his misspelling of the word, mind you — for supposedly possessing intellectual heft. An example of this was historian Michael Beschloss giddily saying in 2008 that Obama’s “I.Q. is off the charts,” though, in fairness and as writer Noemie Emery pointed out, “he didn’t specify which end of the chart it was off of.”
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